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Elon Musk says that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional and money will be irrelevant thanks to AI and robotics
By Sasha RogelbergReporter
November 20, 2025, 1:37 PM ET
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In a decade or two, work will be optional, Elon Musk said at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., this week.STEFANI REYNOLDS—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
In the future, Elon Musk sees humans as metaphorical vegetable farmers.
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The Tesla CEO said at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that in the next 10 to 20 years, work will be optional, likening the decision to have a job to the more laborious upkeep of a vegetable garden.
“My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said. “If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables.”
The future of optional work will be the result of millions of robots in the workforce able to usher in a wave of enhanced productivity, according to Musk. The tech mogul, worth about $470 billion, has made the recent push to expand Tesla beyond just electric vehicles, working on consolidating his sprawling business interests into his broader vision of an AI-fueled, robotic-powered future. That includes his goal of having 80% of Tesla’s value come from his Optimus robots, despite continuous production delays for the humanoid bots.
To many others, the notion of an automated future is less bright, particularly amid concerns about and early evidence of AI displacing entry-level jobs, which may be contributing to Gen Z’s job market woes and flatlining income growth—more of a nightmare than a utopian dream.
But in Musk’s automated, job-voluntary future, money won’t be an issue, he said. Musk takes a page from Iain M. Banks’ Culture series of science fiction novels, in which the self-proclaimed socialist authorconjures a post-scarcity world filled with superintelligent AI beings and no traditional jobs.
“In those books, money doesn’t exist. It’s kind of interesting,” Musk said. “And my guess is, if you go out long enough—assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely—money will stop being relevant.”
