Elon Musk has a plan for a future where jobs are wiped out by artificial intelligence: a benevolent government will provide.
“Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI,” Musk said in an X post.
Musk has pushed government-issued checks not as a temporary stopgap, but a long-term plan for a world of “amazing abundance” he expects AI to create. “AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply,” he added, “so there will not be inflation.”
Musk is a fierce critic of public spending who has long railed against government largesse. Through his oversight of the U.S. DOGE service, he once sought to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. But his latest push proposes a radical expansion of the social safety net — dramatically exceeding Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.
Musk is among a cohort of tech leaders arguing that AI’s coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans — a striking reversal for some tech circles, where many have expressed longstanding hostility to public benefit programs.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI.
Eventually “our current economic setup will no longer make sense,” he wrote in a blog post, adding that “there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.”
Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has “collective ownership” of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider.
“I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody’s got to participate in the upside,” he said in a recent podcast interview.
In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what’s on the horizon. The transition will “require an even more ambitious form of industrial policy,” it read, “one that reflects the ability of democratic societies to act collectively, at scale, to shape their economic future so that superintelligence benefits everyone.”
The positions prompted criticism that the company, which underpins much of the AI boom, was effectively calling for socialism.
The expansive interventions aim to solve a problem the moguls argue will arise from their industry’s success.
Tesla is seeking to build billions of humanoid robots, making human labor effectively obsolete. Another Musk-led company, SpaceX, is set to debut on the stock market in coming weeks with a plan to buttress the AI boom by putting data centers in space. Anthropic, whose Claude chatbot has surged in popularity, released an analysis marking vast swaths of the workforce vulnerable to displacement from AI, including management, business and arts and media.
But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require.
“The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that.”
Musk did not respond to a request for comment. OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment.
Rothstein said Musk’s proposal, which floats a version of UBI far more generous than even optimistic versions from years past, requires business leaders to commit to paying more taxes, a concession they have not indicated they’re willing to make.
Musk appeared to complain about what he said was a $10 billion tax bill, “more than anyone in history,” earlier this month on X.
“Overall, I will probably end up paying trillions in taxes,” he concluded.
Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, “would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues,” according to the paper.
Though Musk’s plan doesn’t give an exact figure for “universal high income,” it would likely require exponentially more funding.
Some UBI advocates are conflicted by the newfound interest. While the tech moguls’ enthusiasm could help spread the gospel of UBI, they’re skeptical of the messengers.
“I think it’s a marketing tactic,” said Scott Santens, a universal basic income advocate who is CEO of the nonprofit Income to Support All Foundation. “He’s trying to thread this needle of, ‘I want to solve this stuff that will potentially put a lot of people out of work.’ And how do you avoid people getting really [angry] at that? Okay, well, you’re still going to get money, everything will be great it’s just you won’t have to work anymore.”
Some conservatives, including those who publicly touted DOGE’s work, have taken umbrage with the entrepreneur’s position.
“The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none,” wrote Jay W. Richards, vice president of social and domestic policy and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “In the real world, Washington would stack a UBI atop existing programs, adding trillions to a budget already careening toward insolvency.”
Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption.
In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing “a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians” for projects including data centers.
In the eyes of Santens, an ally of entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who defined his 2020 presidential campaign by UBI, Musk could convince people of the sincerity of his position easily: Commit to funding to the idea himself.
“The lack of seriousness of them really doing something about it leads people to believe that that isn’t true,” Santens said. “If he were to announce he’s suddenly putting $150 million into some super PAC to push UBI candidates [and] get something going as soon as possible … [it] would be a totally different feeling of ‘this is for real — this is for real real.’”
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