Elon Musk: AI Will Make Money Meaningless. Michael Saylor: We'll Still Fight Over Status

Elon Musk has been among the boldest forecasters of how artificial intelligence will reshape the world, predicting that work will become optional, goods and services will become abundant, and money itself will eventually stop mattering — with AI ushering in a kind of "universal high income." Michael Saylor, the founder of software company Strategy and a billionaire who has built his business around bitcoin, sharply disagrees.

"Not everybody's going to have a house in the Hamptons. Not everybody's going to have a private jet, a private yacht," Saylor said on the "Diary of a CEO" podcast. In his view, AI could make life's basic necessities dramatically cheaper, even free, but that won't erase the value of money — because once essential needs become abundant, people simply redirect their spending toward scarce goods that signal wealth and status.

"If I give you universal healthcare, people are going to want personalized medicine. If I give everybody a house, somebody's going to want a house twice as big," said Saylor, whose net worth is estimated at $3.3 billion. "People will always find a reason to want more — because we're status-driven creatures. That's a cynical way to look at it." He backed up the point with historical examples: clean water and modern medicine were once luxuries even kings and queens couldn't reliably access, and are now ordinary in most of the developed world — yet that hasn't stopped people from chasing luxury, it's just raised the bar.

Saylor argued the same pattern shows up in food: "You see it all over New York — why do people pay $300 for dinner at a restaurant when they could feed themselves for three dollars a day?" As humanity achieves more abundance, he said, it keeps inventing a new "luxury machine" — a trophy asset to chase.

Musk and Saylor may disagree on just how much abundance AI will deliver, but they're not alone in the debate: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has likewise predicted that AI could usher in a new era of breakthroughs in medicine and energy within 10 to 15 years. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has argued that those gains will hinge on how governments respond to job losses, writing that a universal basic income could serve as the best "equalizer."