Musk says AI will make money irrelevant; Saylor disagrees: status drives spending

Elon Musk has emerged as one of the technology industry's most optimistic voices on artificial intelligence, predicting that AI will eventually reshape society so fundamentally that work becomes optional, goods and services become abundant, and money could become irrelevant. Central to this vision is the concept of a 'universal high income' driven by AI's productive capacity.

But Michael Saylor, the 61-year-old founder of software firm MicroStrategy—which has made Bitcoin central to its business strategy—offered a pointed rebuttal in a recent Diary of a CEO interview with host Steven Bartlett. When asked if he agreed with Musk's predictions, Saylor acknowledged that AI could indeed make life's necessities dramatically cheaper, or even free. However, he argued that this would not eliminate money's fundamental value because human nature itself will prevent it. 'Everybody doesn't get a Hampton's house. Everybody doesn't get their own private jet. They don't get their own private yacht,' Saylor said, laying out the core of his disagreement: scarcity, he argued, will never disappear entirely, and money will always serve as a mechanism for allocating it.

Saylor's philosophy centers on what he calls humanity's status-oriented nature. As basic goods become abundant through technological progress, people will simply shift their spending toward scarcer goods that confer wealth and status. 'If I give you universal healthcare, people want private healthcare. If I give everybody a house, someone's going to want a house twice as big,' he explained. 'Everybody's always going to have a reason to want something more because we're status-oriented animals.' (With a net worth of $3.3 billion, Saylor spoke from the vantage point of considerable personal wealth.) He framed this dynamic as 'the cynical way to look at it,' acknowledging the less idealistic view of human motivation.

To support this argument, Saylor drew on historical precedent. Technological advances over centuries have made many necessities dramatically cheaper and more widely available. Clean water and advanced medicine, for instance, are now commonplace across much of the developed world despite once being luxuries that even kings and queens could not reliably access. 'Henry VII didn't have dental crowns. He didn't have X-rays,' Saylor noted. '[We] get modern medical care. The infant mortality rate has plunged. Life is safer. Clean water, clean air, right, clean food—and technology gave them to us.' Yet, he argued, this abundance did not eliminate the desire for something better; instead, it raised the baseline for what people consider luxury. As he put it, 'What happened with the explosion of affluence? Massive utilitarian entitlement.' He illustrated this with the car industry: 'Everybody gets a car, but how many people get a Porsche?' The pattern repeats across sectors. When food became cheap and widely available, luxury restaurants did not disappear; they flourished. 'In New York City, you can see that everywhere—why do we go to restaurants and pay $300 to eat at a restaurant because you can actually feed yourself on three bucks a day?'

While Musk and Saylor diverge on the fate of money itself, they converge on a broader point: artificial intelligence is poised to usher in an era of unprecedented abundance. Other technology and venture leaders echo this view. Dennis Hassabis, who recently transitioned to chairman of Google Deepmind, has similarly predicted an era of discovery and renaissance driven by AI. 'In 10, 15 years' time, we'll be in a kind of new golden era of discovery that [is] a kind of new renaissance,' Hassabis said on Fortune's Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, pointing to breakthroughs in medicine and energy that could eventually enable humanity to 'travel the stars and … explore the galaxy.' Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has also argued that AI will usher in bountifulness, though he sounded a cautionary note: the economic benefits will hinge heavily on how governments respond to the job displacement that AI will cause. 'Productivity will favor increasing average incomes but job displacement will do the reverse even as the goods and services produced increases dramatically,' Khosla wrote in 2024. He suggested that 'universal basic income may be the best equalizer' and called for ensuring 'that median income rises along with average income.'