In a fresh episode of the podcast "The Builders," Elon Musk, in conversation with biographer Walter Isaacson, spoke of a future that seems almost fantastical yet rests on quite concrete physical constraints. The conversation came out on 20 October 2026 and quickly spread through clips. Musk described a world in which robots and space exploration are capable of inflating the economy to a size a million times greater than Earth's. And in this new reality, conventional money loses its meaning, opening space for entirely different possibilities.
"If you have robots, you go into space and you can build a mass accelerator on the Moon, then potentially you can reach an economy a million times larger than Earth's. Money becomes irrelevant," Musk said. "Currency, of course, will remain, but I think it will be measured in fundamental physical metrics like watts and tons, mass and energy. Conventional currency will no longer matter."
A mass accelerator is a device capable of accelerating cargo with an electromagnetic field and launching it from the Moon's surface with virtually no fuel. Combined with an army of robots capable of extracting resources, building and manufacturing, such a system, according to Musk, opens the path to almost limitless production. When the volume of goods and services grows by orders of magnitude, satisfying any human need becomes a trivial task. At that moment money ceases to be a mechanism for distributing scarcity—because scarcity almost no longer remains. Everyone will be able to get any goods and services they want. This is not merely an increase in wealth but a qualitative shift to a state of abundance where material concerns recede into the background.
Musk did not stop at economics. He said outright that in such a world "there will be nothing that humans can do better than AI and robots." But instead of gloomy conclusions he offered a warm and accessible analogy: gardening. Today no one is obliged to grow vegetables—they can be bought in a store. But many still dig in the soil because it brings pleasure, allows them to create something with their own hands and share it with friends. The same thing, Musk believes, may happen with work, creativity and any other pursuits. People will find ways to be happy—just as those who have retired and are no longer bound by the need to earn a living are often happy. Freed time can be directed toward art, research, communication or simply whatever brings joy.
Control became a separate theme. If digital intelligence surpasses biological intelligence a million times over, "it's hard to imagine that humans will remain at the helm." Musk added with characteristic restraint: "So I hope that AI will be kind to us." He proposed instilling in systems a striving for truth-seeking and curiosity, as well as treating the endless dystopian scenarios online with more caution—after all, it is on this data that models are trained. Better, in his view, to tell stories about "protopia"—a future that is not ideal but achievable and generally good. A friendly overseer, a gardener or a caring companion—such images can help shape a gentler trajectory of development.
All of this sounds like a continuation of Musk's long-standing ideas about solar energy, Optimus robots and a multiplanetary civilization. Only now he links them into a single chain: robots produce, space provides resources and energy, and the measure of value becomes not paper or digital tokens but physical quantities—power and mass. That which cannot be printed but can only be extracted or generated. In such a picture of the world, a prospect opens not only of material abundance but also of new meaning—when the human being ceases to be a cog in the economy and gains the freedom to explore, create and simply live.
The conversation leaves room for curiosity. We stand on the threshold of an era when conventional economic laws may give way to the laws of physics. The watt and the ton are units that cannot be printed. They must be extracted, converted, delivered. And if Musk is right, it is precisely they that will become the true measure of abundance. And humanity, perhaps for the first time in history, will find itself in a situation where material sufficiency ceases to be a question of survival and turns into a question of choice.
The interview leaves behind a strange feeling of an open door. Beyond it lies an economy on the scale of the solar system, a currency of pure energy and a question that so far remains unanswered: what will this new world be like if machines truly become a million times smarter than us.
