The world’s richest man just talked about money in a way only a billionaire could.
Musk said that future technology will upend the global economy and make money as we know it irrelevant. Instead of using fiat currency, Musk predicted wealth will be measured by “fundamental physics metrics” like mass, power or energy.
“If you’re several orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth’s economy, then providing humans whatever goods and services they can think of that they might want is trivial,” he explained.
How will such a radical shift affect the way that humans think about their purpose in life?
“I think people will find ways to be happy in the same way that, say, people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they’re not working,” Musk said. “But I think the reality is there won’t be anything that humans can do that that the AI and the robots can’t do better.”
As for the already dramatic wealth gap between the ultra-rich and working people, Musk dismissed any anxiety about future economic inequality and focused on what wealth actually means.
“Going from say a billion dollars net worth to $10 billion of net worth doesn’t make you 10 times happier or mean you have 10 times more stuff,” he said. “It actually means you’ve got a resource allocation problem, assuming that you wish to be an efficient resource allocator.”