The Richest Man Alive Just Announced the End of Money

I wrote a book about Elon Musk. I called it In Musk We Trust, and I meant it.

So, it’s strange to be writing the sentence that comes next: this time, I think the math is against him.

Late last month, from the floor of the Texas Gigafactory, he told The Economist that “money won’t matter in 2036.” It wasn’t a throwaway line — he’s been building to it for two years. Universal high income. Work becomes optional. The Treasury simply issues people checks.

There’s something almost too perfect about the richest man in recorded history announcing the end of money.

He’s right about the machines. AI will race past the written record of human intelligence, and I won’t spend a word arguing the point. Where he’s wrong is the part that actually decides whether abundance shows up on schedule: the economics.

One number holds up the entire vision. Musk says the global economy will be “10 times the current size in 10 years.”

That works out to 25.9% growth. Compounded. Every year. For ten years.

For context: the world grew 2.9% last year. The best single year on record since 1961 was 6.6%. China’s fastest decade — a billion people moving into factories — ran near 10%. Musk is calling for nine times the world’s current growth rate, sustained for a decade, across 194 economies at the same time.

That isn’t a bull case. It’s a mathematical impossibility — and I show exactly why in the full piece.

→ Read the full breakdown on Evervests.com

Then there’s the money itself. GDP isn’t a measure of stuff; it’s output priced in money, and every dollar of it is a transaction someone paid for. Ten times the economy means roughly ten times the money changing hands — money that has to exist and has to move.

You can build a billion robots and put them to work on every unfilled job in the country. That’s more output. It is not income until someone pays for it.

That single distinction — output versus income — is where the “issue everyone checks” plan quietly falls apart. In the article I run the ledger: what the money supply would have to become, what a universal six-figure check actually costs against everything the government collects, and why adoption, physics, and human nature stretch this over decades instead of years.

I also lay out the future I do think is coming. Abundance is real. It just walks in the front door, on the old rules — and it doesn’t beat the clock Musk set.

Read the full article →

You can bank on one thing — money will still matter in 2036.

Thank you for reading.

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Not financial advice. Full disclosures on evervests.com. Images created by AI.