Is Elon Musk a business genius, as his fans and investors proclaim, or “among the top ten minds in history, rivaling polymaths like da Vinci or Newton,” as his chatbot Grok famously averred?
Whatever he is, you definitely couldn’t accuse him of being particularly self-aware. Early Thursday morning, Musk took to his social media site X to deliver some sage advice to us peons living paycheck to paycheck: don’t save money for the future, because it’s “pointless.”
“Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance,” Musk wrote in a tweet.
It’s a feat of hypocrisy as staggering as Musk’s obscene preponderance of wealth. He’s a sometimes-trillionaire, a net worth catapulted well past the $900 billion mark following the uber-hyped IPO of his company SpaceX. If he blew $100 million everyday for the next twenty years of his life, he still wouldn’t even come close to spending all the money he’s amassed.
Musk is also pretty miserly compared to many of his fellow elites. He has few philanthropic initiatives and gives very little to charitable causes. (Mostly, he seems to enjoy pouring money into Republic election campaigns, including some $300 million towards Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run.)
The charity he does operate, the Musk Foundation, is under scrutiny for its opaque structure and its shady donations. Much of its nearly $15 billion in assets has gone towards organizations with close ties to Musk and his businesses.
Not that long ago, Musk also agreed that charities are a “net negative” on the world; perhaps that’s why he barely pretends that his foundation is in any way charitable. The New York Times reported that the Musk Foundation failed to give away the minimum amount of money it was supposed to in 2023 by a margin of $421 million.
His latest rant about saving money is as much a testament to how out of touch he is as it is his delusional optimism about AI — a technology he has repeatedly insisted will soon bring about untold “abundance” for all.
In a now infamous interview with The Economist this summer, Musk said “there really won’t be anything AI won’t be able to do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps” — which, in his eyes, is a good thing.
“I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years,” he continued. “The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of.”
It’s not the first time that his advice for this coming future was to try being a spendthrift.
“Don’t worry about squirrelling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years — it won’t matter,” Musk said in a January podcast appearance. “You won’t need to save for retirement. If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”
Earlier this month, Musk pledged to give “every kid in America” a single share of SpaceX stock — a move that was seemingly in response to his AI rival Anthropic vowing to divert a huge portion of its shares into a philanthropic “public benefit fund.”
It remains to be seen if Musk, notorious for making grand promises he doesn’t make good on, will follow through.
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