Elon Musk sat down for a long interview with The Economist and dropped a line that stuck with people. He thinks that within about five years, artificial intelligence will be smarter than every human being on Earth put together. Not smarter than one genius. Smarter than all of us, added up.
He put a date on it. Around 2031. And he did not stop there. He also said that within ten years, people will not really be in charge of the world anymore. Machines will be. Then he called all of that the good scenario.
The exact claim he made
Musk did not hedge much. His words were, “I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps.” That last bit is the only escape hatch he gave the human race. We are still the best at being human.
The interview ran about 90 minutes and was recorded at a Tesla factory in Texas. The setting matters. Cars there are assembled without human workers on the line. So while Musk talked about a future where machines do the work, he was standing inside a building where that future is already happening. He kept saying the momentum behind all of this has grown bigger than any one person or company, including his own.
The chimpanzee line
Here is where it got heavy. Musk used an analogy that he clearly picked on purpose. If the gap in smarts between AI and humans ends up bigger than the gap between humans and chimpanzees, he said, then it is hard to imagine the chimps would be running things.
In case that is too subtle, in this story we are the chimps. He was talking to Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, and she pushed him on how much his position has flipped. A few years ago Musk was begging for a slowdown and warning everyone about the danger. Now he says the danger is still real, but the technology cannot be stopped, so we should just keep going and try to steer it. He put the year humans lose control at roughly 2036.
A 10 to 20 percent chance of disaster
When Beddoes asked about the odds of AI causing a true catastrophe, Musk repeated a number he first gave back in March 2025. He said there is a 10 to 20 percent chance of, in his words, killer robots wiping out humanity. Read that again. One in five, on the high end.
What is strange is that the number has not changed his behavior at all. He cited it while asking for a pause. Now he cites the same figure while pushing to speed things up. His logic goes like this: “Let’s say you can’t do anything about it. I guess the only thing we can try to do is minimize the probability of the bad outcome.” He also floated a light safety plan where rival companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind would check each other’s models before release. Regulators would only step in if a company refused to fix a flagged problem.
Musk says money won’t matter by 2036
This is the part that got the most eye rolls. Musk believes all of this leads to what he calls an age of amazing abundance, where anyone can have anything they can think of. If robots and AI make everything, he argues, then goods get so cheap and so common that money loses its point.
His actual quote: “You want money for food, housing, transport, entertainment. If that is so abundant, what do you need money for in that case?” He has floated this idea before, calling it universal high income instead of universal basic income. Work becomes optional. The Treasury just hands out checks. He predicted prices would fall, not rise, because machines would crank out more stuff than the money supply could keep up with. His summary of the whole vision: “This may sound preposterous, but here we are in 2026. Let’s see where we stand in 2036.”
Just print checks?
Beddoes did not let the check idea slide. She asked the obvious question. Where does the money come from? If you just mail everyone checks, you get inflation. Musk waved it off and said inflation would not be a problem, that you could print money and still get deflation because there would be so much abundance floating around.
Economists at the American Institute for Economic Research have a blunt answer to this. Scarcity does not vanish when robots make physical goods cheap. It just moves. A house with a great view is still scarce. A seat at a top college is still scarce. So is the time and attention of a person everyone wants to meet. You can build a billion robots and none of them can make a second beachfront lot appear. That is the hole critics keep poking in the whole theory.
Why a lot of experts aren’t buying it
Musk’s five-year window is way more aggressive than what most researchers expect. A broad survey of AI scientists puts human-level AI closer to 2047, which is 16 years past Musk’s date. Some AI researchers also argue that today’s systems still fall short of real understanding, reasoning, and awareness. They are impressive at writing text, generating images, and automating tasks. They are not close to the full package of a human mind, the argument goes.
Then there is his track record. On X, users piled on fast. One wrote that his forecasts are “always incorrect.” Another said, “AI is not doing anything magical, just using human intelligence that was fed to it to make practical decisions.” A fairer comment landed in the middle: “That’s a bold prediction. Whether it happens in five years or not, AI progress is moving much faster than most people expected.” Plenty of people also noted that Musk owns xAI and Grok, so he has a direct money reason to hype the field.
The cash already pouring in
Here is the thing that makes the debate feel less like sci-fi. The money is real and it is enormous. The biggest tech companies have committed close to $700 billion to build data centers in 2026 alone, on top of $380 billion the year before. That is not a bet on maybe. That is companies acting like the future Musk describes is already booked.
Lawmakers noticed too. In 2026, state legislatures across the country introduced more than 2,100 AI-related bills, covering worker protections and automated decision-making. Not everyone shares Musk’s sunny ending. When he posted that work would become optional, investor Michael Burry, the guy from “The Big Short,” replied with one word: “False.” Then he added, “There will be revolution first.” His point is that even if the abundance shows up someday, a lot of people could lose jobs first, long before anyone sees a benefit.
So should you actually worry?
Musk himself said the whole thing fills him with excitement and fear at the same time. That is honestly the right way to hold it. He is not some random guy tweeting. He runs Tesla, SpaceX, and an AI company, and he has more skin in this than almost anyone alive. But he is also a salesman, and the man who once begged for a slowdown is now selling the gas pedal.
The safest read is to take the timeline with a big grain of salt and take the direction seriously. Even critics agree AI is moving faster than they figured a couple years back. Whether the year is 2031 or 2047, the questions Musk raised are the same. Who controls these systems, who pays when jobs disappear, and what happens to money if machines make everything. Musk gave his answer and dared everyone to check back in ten years. Mark your calendar for 2036. He clearly already has.
