Elon Musk Predicts Work will be ‘Optional’ in Coming Decades
By Eric Revell
Tesla CEO says AI and humanoid robots will eliminate poverty and make everyone wealthy.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the spread of AI technologies could make work optional in 10 to 20 years, though he cautioned there is a lot of work to do between now and then.
Billionaire Elon Musk is signaling that artificial intelligence and robotics could eliminate the need to work in the next few decades.
Musk attended the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum and was asked on a panel about the long-term impacts of robotics and AI on the workforce. He offered a bold prediction about the future of work.
“I don’t know what long term is, maybe it’s 10, 20 years or something like that,” Musk said. “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 in the same way, like you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it because they like growing vegetables,” Musk said.
Elon Musk said he thinks work could become optional in the future.
“That will be what work is like. Optional,” Musk said, adding that it will take “a lot of work to get to that point.”
Musk went on to say that money could eventually stop being relevant in a future dominated by AI and robotics, noting that in books about a positive AI future money often no longer exists.
Musk spoke alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
“My guess is, if you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, then money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.”
“There will still be constraints on power, electricity and mass. The fundamental physics elements will still be constraints. But I think at some point, currency becomes irrelevant.”
The Optimus or Tesla Bot humanoid robot.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has been bullish on AI and robotics, which has become a focus of the EV-maker as it develops its Optimus humanoid robot, which is also known as Tesla Bot.
Musk said he sees humanoid robots becoming the “biggest industry or the biggest product ever, bigger than cellphones or anything else, because everyone’s going to want one.”
He said, “AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty,” and that while Tesla will be a pioneer in the sector, there will be “many other companies that make humanoid robots.”
“There is basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics,” Musk said.
