Musk was describing a future in which AI and robotics become capable of satisfying nearly every material human need. If machines can produce food, housing, transport, healthcare and manufactured goods in extraordinary abundance, money may no longer be required to allocate scarce human labour.
It sounds outrageous.
But money is not a law of nature. It is a coordination system built for a world in which resources, productive capacity and human effort are limited.
What happens when some of those limitations begin to collapse?
Suppose energy becomes extremely cheap. Robots build houses, grow food and manufacture products. AI provides education, medical guidance, design and analytical work at almost no marginal cost.
Would necessities become rights rather than purchases?
Would people still work when survival no longer depends upon wages? Would ownership of the machines create unprecedented freedom—or unprecedented inequality?
And would money truly disappear?
Physical land would remain limited. Human attention would remain finite. Trust, status, influence, authentic relationships and desirable locations could still be scarce. Perhaps money would survive, but increasingly purchase access to these rarer experiences rather than ordinary goods.
Or perhaps scarcity would not disappear at all.
Perhaps it would simply retreat from the external world and take refuge inside the human condition.
The machines might eventually learn how to produce almost anything.
But they cannot yet produce another hour of your life.