Working will become optional in just 20 years thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, Elon Musk has claimed.
The world’s richest man said the decision to work will become like a hobby such as sport or growing your own vegetables.
And, somewhat curiously for a man worth $360billion, he insisted that money will also become irrelevant in the future.
Mr Musk told the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington: ‘In ten to 20 years my prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that.
‘If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard.
‘It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables. That will be what work is like. Optional.’
The Tesla chief executive, who recently agreed a record-breaking pay package that could be worth nearly $1trillion (£760billion), said there was still a lot that needed to be done before this goal was achieved.
But he insisted that if technological improvements continued at the same pace, earning cash will no longer be necessary to live a comfortable life.
‘There is only one way to make everyone wealthy – and that’s AI and robotics,’ Mr Musk added. ‘There will still be constraints on power. But I think at some point currency becomes irrelevant.’ Tesla has been working on a humanoid robot named Optimus, or ‘Tesla Bot’.
The South-African billionaire has said one day everyone will own such a gadget, which will help ‘eliminate poverty’.
Economists have questioned whether robotics will be able to provide such benefits in a short time frame given how expensive the devices are to produce at scale.
Mr Musk’s comments come as France’s government launched an investigation into his AI chatbot Grok after it generated French-language posts which questioned the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Grok, built by Musk company xAI and integrated into his social media platform X, said gas chambers at the death camp were designed for ‘disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus’ rather than for mass murder – language associated with Holocaust denial.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed the comments had been added to an existing cybercrime investigation into X.
