Elon Musk Backs Universal High Income Fearing AI Will Take Every Job

Volk AI August 24, 2025 Imported News, Zerohedge

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Musk predicts employment will become obsolete.

“It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job or sort of personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything.”

Those are statement Musk made last year at an AI Safety Summit in the U.K. He’s again repeating his concerns.

Universal High Income

AI Generated Overview: Elon Musk views universal basic income (UBI) as a necessary outcome of accelerating automation and artificial intelligence (AI), which he believes will displace many jobs, leading to a “universal high income” future where robots perform most tasks, freeing humans for other pursuits. He argues UBI would provide a foundational income floor, allowing people more freedom and preventing mass unemployment caused by robots. Musk has framed this not as a handout, but as a societal adaptation to technological progress, a way to create a prosperous “Star Trek future” rather than a negative “Terminator” one.

On March 27, 2025 Nasdaq.Com reported Elon Musk Says Universal Income Is Inevitable

Universal basic income (UBI) provides regular payments to all individuals in a community, regardless of their employment status or financial need. The idea is that when everyone has enough money to satisfy their basic needs, the overall well-being of society at large is enhanced.

For some people, the thought of a future without work and a universal high income may sound like heaven. But the truth is that most people derive value and purpose out of working, and that is the fear that Musk has about the future.

If we’re all ultimately replaced by artificial intelligence and don’t need to work, society could become fragmented, and individuals could suffer from depression as they no longer feel a meaning or purpose in their lives.

“The question will really be one of meaning. … If the computer can do, and the robots can do, everything better than you, then does your life have meaning?”

Fortunately, even Musk sees the future as being more benign than this. Instead of living aimless lives without purpose, Musk believes that there’s another option: “Long term … any job that somebody does will be optional. … If you want to do a job as kinda like a hobby, you can do a job, but otherwise, the AI and robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”

Elon Musk and Sam Altman Promote AI-funded UBI

On August 14, 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported Elon Musk and Sam Altman Promote AI-funded UBI

Technology titans including Elon Musk and Sam Altman see a future flush with wealth generated by artificial intelligence. Some tech heavyweights have endorsed no-strings cash distributions for a decade, so-called universal basic income, or UBI.

While many think of UBI as a taxpayer-funded system, Silicon Valley’s elite envision AI doing humans’ work, from mundane factory jobs to highly skilled white-collar roles, and funding payouts through cost savings and more revenue. Tech leaders say that revenue can be shared under a massive wealth-redistribution system.

Suddenly, an idea once seen as a socialist policy that would reward idleness is one of the AI boom’s hottest acronyms.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, funded an experiment starting in 2016 that gave $1,000 in cash to a group of low-income individuals each month for three years. Recipients worked slightly less and mostly spent on basic necessities, said Elizabeth Rhodes, who ran the OpenResearch study.

Altman said in an appearance on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast in July that he now thinks that instead of money, everyone could receive “an ownership share in whatever the AI creates.” That would allow the wealth accumulated by AI to be spread across the population, he said, calling the idea “universal extreme wealth.”

He imagined a scenario in which every human is given a trillion tokens, the basic unit of information that large language models use, each year to sell or treat as personal wealth—an alternative to all wealth being consolidated in the “normal capitalistic system.”

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, touts “universal high income,” the concept that AI will automate most production and the public can share in the revenue.

Musk said at a forum in May that universal income could create a “Star Trek future” with “a level of prosperity and hopefully happiness that we can’t quite imagine yet.” (He also warned that if handled incorrectly, we could end up with a “Terminator” future.)

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has said up to half of the work at the company is now done by AI. He is an evangelist for universal basic income and said during the pandemic that he sees Covid-19 stimulus checks as a model for broader income distribution.

He wrote that automation will drive income inequality and necessitate supplemental income “for those who cannot be retrained, and even those traditionally not compensated for raising a family or volunteering to help others,” in a Fortune article. He has said that AI will generate wealth by lowering costs for companies.

Obvious Silliness

If jobs are obsolete, we must assume raw materials mine themselves, no one is needed to farm, and energy is free and unlimited.

In this scenario, how does anyone get paid anything? Who is paying whom, with what money?

Where does the electricity come from to power the AI?

Grok AI Chat

I had an interesting chat with Musk’s Grok AI about Universal High Income. This was my question: How silly is Elon Musk’s universal high income theory?

Here are some snips.

Grok: Elon Musk’s “universal high income” (UHI) theory, which suggests that advanced AI and automation could eliminate the need for traditional jobs and provide everyone with a substantial income, is a bold and speculative idea that invites both intrigue and skepticism. Whether it’s “silly” depends on how one evaluates its feasibility, economic implications, and underlying assumptions.

The silliness likely stems from the lack of a concrete plan. Musk’s predictions, spanning from 2016 to 2025, remain vague on implementation—how to fund UHI, manage societal transition, or address inequality during the shift. Without specifics, it risks being dismissed as utopian optimism, especially given his track record of ambitious (and sometimes delayed) promises. Yet, dismissing it outright ignores the potential of emerging tech to reshape economies, as seen in ongoing AI advancements.

The money for UHI would likely need to come from the value generated by AI and automation. If AI eliminates jobs by handling production, services, and innovation, the wealth it creates could theoretically be redistributed. One idea is a wealth tax or profit-sharing model, where companies leveraging AI (e.g., Tesla, xAI) contribute a portion of their output to a public fund.

Mish: “But if no one is working – tell me who is paying the taxes, and who is buying what, with what money?”

Grok: That’s a sharp question—it highlights a potential circular logic flaw in the universal high income (UHI) concept, especially in a fully jobless scenario where AI handles all production.

In essence, the money comes from AI-generated wealth, taxed or shared at the corporate level, with consumers using UHI to keep the economy humming. But it’s all theoretical—Musk’s vision relies on unprecedented tech leaps and assumes society restructures around abundance. Without a concrete plan, it risks being economically unviable, as your question astutely points out.

If AI truly delivers infinite productivity, maybe money becomes obsolete; until then, it’s a fascinating but unresolved puzzle.

Altman, Musk, and Benioff describe a world in which everyone is useless. Everyone gets free money, but where does the money come from?

Let’s assume that 10 percent of the people are not useless. How do they get paid? From the free money they give to everyone else?

This new fangled UHI model blows up the same way as every previous UBI model. It doesn’t scale and no one can say where the money come from.