Elon Musk says money won’t matter by 2036. Can he possibly be right?

It was only a few days later, when the interview was published, that Musk became furious about it. Seeing himself ridiculed on X, the social network he owns and runs according to his whims, Musk called her a “traitor to the West, pure and simple”, shortly before sharing memes suggesting traitors should be shot.

By now, the media has become so numbed to Elon Musk’s antics that the world’s richest man sharing content that could be interpreted as a death threat barely made the headlines – but Musk’s fury at the interview was all but impossible to ignore.

Watching the interview, though, it seems like Musk’s anger is misdirected. Minton Beddoes delicately and politely asks Musk difficult, incisive questions, keeping him calm through some carefully directed flattery. That’s a journalist doing her job. 

If any line in the interview damaged Elon Musk, though, it was one he offered spontaneously: if any true fan of Musk watched that interview and took what he said seriously, they might well have walked away with the impression he was telling them to sell all of their shares in his companies.

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 Could Musk’s outburst be some misdirected anger at himself? To explain what happened, we first need to take a step back. Musk has two listed companies: Tesla is worth around $960 billion, and SpaceX is worth $1.5 trillion (though it was worth $2.5 trillion just a month ago).

Unlike some other big tech companies, neither has achieved their sky-high valuations through generating huge, sustained profits, or even necessarily by dominating their sector. Tesla makes very little profit, and sells fewer than 1% of the world’s cars, but is worth more than every other automaker on the planet combined, because Elon sells a story.

For a long time, Musk told investors that the value in Tesla didn’t lie in its car sales, but in the fact it would achieve full self-driving by the mid-to-late 2010s. For a while, he said its future would lie in robotaxis, replacing Ubers across the planet. More recently, his story has changed again – Tesla is a robotics company, which will put a humanoid robot in every home and factory.

When you invest in Tesla, you’re not so much buying a share of the company as it is today. You’re betting on the story that Elon Musk tells about how amazingly profitable it will be in the future.

SpaceX is an even bigger bet of that sort. Until recently, it was a space launch and satellite company, spending billions developing bigger and better rockets, and so not making much profit. Today, it is an AI company with a space launch company attached – Musk has promised 90% of its future profits will come from AI, even as it loses billions at present investing to make that happen.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire – even if only briefly, as SpaceX’s value fell (he’s currently worth $730 billion) – by selling a story, more than selling cars or rockets.

But in his interview with The Economist, Elon Musk’s story changed again. On the surface, the new story is a happy one: “I think we’re headed for an age of amazing abundance,” Musk told Minton Beddoes, who asked in turn what his companies would actually be doing to “make money” in ten years’ time.

After babbling for a time, Musk interrupted Minton Beddoes’ next question with a further thought. “Money won’t matter in 2036,” he said. “What do you want money for? You want money for goods and services, right? You want money for obviously food, housing, transport, entertainment. 

“Well, if that is so abundant that there’s more that the robots and AI are providing more goods and services than any human could possibly consume, what do you need money for in that case?”

This may sound either wonderful or terrible to you, and you might feel sceptical of the claim given Musk’s dubious track record on predictions. But for the CEO of two multi-billion-dollar companies, it is an astonishing statement to make.

The valuation of a public company is, essentially, the market’s best guess of what its future profits will be worth. In a post-money world, companies make no profits, and have no value.

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If Elon Musk is right, his companies – just like every other company – will effectively be worthless within just ten years, in part because money itself will have no meaning. But that leaves Musk in a paradox: the multi-billion-dollar valuations of both of his companies are essentially bets on his vision, and his ability to generate future profits.

Now, if Musk’s vision is correct, his companies shouldn’t be worth much. But if his vision is wrong, and he isn’t the man who can see the future and turn it into huge profits, then why should people buy his companies at their hugely inflated valuations? 

So far, Elon Musk’s companies haven’t plummeted in value. Investors are essentially saying that they think Musk is right about the future, except about the part where he says it’ll create a lot of abundance. They are picking and choosing his comments, in the hope of a good return.

But even for the world’s richest man, the stock market is a fickle mistress. The vast majority of Musk’s astonishing wealth is tied up in the two companies he runs. If people stop believing in their value – if people stop believing in him – his money disappears, potentially overnight.

Musk has made himself the richest man in history by telling the right story. Perhaps his reason for lashing out now is because he’s worried he’s started telling the wrong one.