Elon Musk has proposed the ultimate solution to prevent AI-related unemployment. It is almost extraterrestrially simple: provide a super basic income for everyone. Or, put more simply, a free breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all. Enjoyed from the patio of a penthouse.
Musk’s ideas, like those of other super-wealthy people and those who aspire to join their ranks, follow the logic of the Law of More: More is Better. So, if a basic income can solve the problems of the unemployed, a super basic income can solve everyone’s problems. In the meantime, it will make the super-rich even richer. Musk’s post about a super basic income on X racked up 68 million views almost instantly on April 24th.
Musk’s proposal: much more than a basic income
Musk is advocating for a “universal high income.” That’s something different from the familiar basic income. Whereas a basic income is primarily intended as a safety net, Musk envisions a substantial sum that enables people to actively participate in an economy largely run by machines.
His reasoning is strikingly simple. According to him, AI and robotics will generate such an enormous increase in production that inflation won’t be a problem. After all, there will be a much greater supply of goods and services available for purchase with the higher income.
Job losses are already happening
The problem is clear: AI is costing jobs. According to the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, nearly 55,000 jobs were cut in the US in 2025, with AI playing a role. Major companies like Amazon, Salesforce, and Oracle slashed thousands of positions. And the trend continues. In the first months of 2026, tens of thousands more jobs are reported lost.
Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, warns that up to half of all entry-level office jobs could disappear within five years.
Universal abundance, or a total crash?
Musk sketches a future in which scarcity largely disappears. In his words, everyone could theoretically have a penthouse, simply because productive capacity explodes. Machines generate the wealth, and people share in it.
Can that work? The idea is already working for Musk: he’s getting attention. A lot of attention. So much attention that there will be many people who draw hope from it, and also many people who will laugh off a genuinely good idea, the basic income, because Musk is exploiting it in an absurd form.
So here, for what it’s worth, are some serious criticisms of Musk’s “universal high income” proposal:
The economic reasoning is circular and unproven. Musk claims that AI will generate so much production that inflation won’t be a problem. But this assumes that those productivity gains are distributed broadly and equally, which is historically not the pattern of technological upheavals. Productivity gains typically accrue to the balance sheets of the companies that own the technology and their shareholders, not to the coffers of the government that has to write the checks.
The funding question is completely sidestepped. Who pays for this “high universal benefit”? Even for far simpler programs, political consensus is already out of reach. Musk offers no answer on how this would be financed. Taxes on tech companies? Money printing?
The timing problem is ignored entirely. Jobs are disappearing right now, but setting up a program of this scale would take years. The proposal offers no bridge for the people losing their jobs to automation today.
Musk contradicts himself institutionally. As CEO of companies that are actively driving the automation wave, he simultaneously advocates for a government solution to absorb the consequences. That’s a curious division of roles: privatize the profits, socialize the damage. (Or is that precisely the plan?)
The biggest problem: infinite abundance in a finite world. Economists argue that material scarcity doesn’t disappear with higher productive capacity. The real-world problem is that infinite abundance and infinite growth blow up the world: the climate, nature, and our entire ecosystem.
This is, of course, “just” a post on X, not a policy proposal. But one that, at the time of writing, had already surpassed 68 million views. The idea is completely detached from reality and only makes our current problems worse. The real poison lies in the damage done to a genuinely good idea — the universal basic income — by pushing it into the absurd. An even greater poison lies in the underlying motive: how to make the mega-rich even richer by plundering the planet and everything on it, physically and in the digital space. A free lunch? Forget about it.
