Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, is very good at making money. His track record of predicting the future is less stellar.
Through the years, Musk has made several outlandish forecasts—about self-driving cars, about space exploration, about brain chips, about robotics—that have not panned out. The Tesla CEO and former steward of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency seems at least a bit self-aware. During a surprise appearance and his debut at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, he concluded with something like a mission statement: “Generally, for quality of life, it’s better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.”
Still, when one’s companies have their hands in so many industries—autos and robotics (Tesla), space travel and telecommunications (SpaceX), social media (X), artificial intelligence (xAI), infrastructure (the Boring Company), and neurotechnology (Neuralink)—even off-the-cuff predictions can move global markets. Here are a few prognostications Musk made on Thursday:
Aliens Don’t Exist (Probably)
Elon Musk opened his Davos remarks—a conversation with friend and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink—with a discussion of his values, and a few jokes about aliens. “We have 9,000 satellites up there and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship,” Musk said. “We need to assume that life and consciousness are extremely rare and it might only be us.”
Humanoid Robots Will Transform Human Life—and Go on Sale in 2027
Musk started making promises about Optimus, the company’s humanoid robot, in 2021. Most recently, he said Tesla—now rebranded as a robotics and autonomy company—would make thousands of Optimus robots in 2025. But the company is reportedly still struggling to get Optimus’ hand to work. That did not stop Musk repeating in Davos some of his most far-reaching claims about the way the product would change human life forever.
“If we have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free, or close to it, and ubiquitous robotics, you will have an explosion, an expansion of the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent,” Musk said. What does that mean for you? Billions of robots powered by artificial intelligence will outnumber humans and “saturate all human needs,” he said. “You won’t be able to think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point, there will be such an abundance of goods and services.”
But first, of course, Tesla will have to start selling Optimus, which Musk said would happen late next year.
Robotaxis Will Be “Very Widespread” in the US by 2027
In 2025, after years of self-driving promises, Tesla finally launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, albeit with a human safety monitor sitting in each passenger seat. That didn’t stop Musk from asserting that most of the US population would have access to robotaxi by the end of that year.
Now, in 2026, Musk is moving the goalposts again. He said Thursday that his company’s robotaxis would be “very widespread by the end of this year in the US.” If history is a guide, that won’t happen—but the company is working on launching robotaxi service in a handful of states with laxer regulations, including Arizona, Florida, and Nevada.
Human Aging Is a “Very Solvable Problem”
Musk acknowledged that he hasn’t spent much time investigating human aging. But he predicted that there would be a solution. “When we find what causes aging, we’ll find it’s incredibly obvious,” he said. Get to it, Silicon Valley peers.
SpaceX Will Complete a Fully Reusable Rocket This Year
SpaceX has been working on its reusable rocket platform Starship for a decade, and in those years, has missed several of Musk’s big space deadlines. He predicted in 2020 that a crewed Mars mission would launch by 2024. He said that Starship would reach orbit by 2022, though the company didn’t pull it off until last year.
At Davos, Musk repeated a promise from last year: that Starship would be fully reusable by the end of this year, cutting space travel costs by “a factor of 100” and eventually allowing space freight to compete with airplane freight prices. SpaceX has run successful test flights recently, but a fully reusable rocket by the end of this year could be a stretch.
AI Will Become Smarter Than a Human This Year—and Smarter Than All of Humanity in 2035
Musk has been both deeply involved in AI’s development and deeply doomer-y about its meaning for years. (See: his ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI, its founders, and Microsoft.) In Davos, Musk once again mentioned his wish to avoid a Terminator-like future. But he also indicated that it’s coming. “The rate at which AI is progressing, I think we have AI that is smarter than any human this year, and no later than next year,” he said. By 2035, it will be “smarter than all of humanity, collectively.”
Per usual, whether Musk gets this one right comes down to definitions. What does “smarter” mean? This month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he didn’t believe researchers were anywhere close to creating what he called “God AI.” The technology is good at discrete tasks, but doing everything? ”That ‘some day’ is probably on biblical scales, on galactic scales,” Huang said.
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