Elon Musk Says Money Will Become Irrelevant, With Energy and Mass as the New...

Elon Musk has once again argued that traditional money will lose its relevance in the future, replaced by fundamental physical measures such as energy and mass.

In comments circulating widely, the Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI CEO stated that currency will ultimately be measured in physics-based metrics like wattage and tonnage.

The remarks, drawn from a recent interview, aligned with a consistent theme in Musk's thinking. He has repeatedly described a coming era of extreme abundance driven by artificial intelligence and robotics, in which the production of goods and services vastly outpaces the need for conventional currency.

In that environment, he suggests, AI systems themselves will care little about dollars or other human currencies and will instead optimize around real constraints: power (wattage) and physical resources (tonnage or mass).

Musk has made similar points throughout 2025 and 2026. In June, while discussing the scale of solar energy collection needed for advanced AI, he wrote that conventional money would no longer be relevant long before humanity reached the ability to harness even a tiny fraction of the Sun's output via lunar factories and mass drivers.

"Mass & energy will take the place of dollars," he said. Earlier comments linked the idea to universal high income, in which governments or systems simply issue money because automated production creates persistent abundance and deflationary pressure.

The vision rests on a closed technological loop: abundant solar energy powering robot manufacturing, which builds more chips and AI systems, which in turn improve energy collection and production.

Once that cycle becomes self-sustaining at planetary or interplanetary scale, Musk argues, financial accounting becomes secondary to physical throughput. What matters is how much useful work intelligence, manufacturing, or matter manipulation can be performed with available energy and materials.

This perspective carries an obvious irony. Musk's own net worth has reached extraordinary levels, particularly following SpaceX's public listing, making him one of the wealthiest individuals in history at the very moment he predicts money's diminishing importance. He has acknowledged the contrast with characteristic brevity when it has been pointed out to him.

The idea is not entirely new in economic or technological forecasting. Thinkers have long speculated about post-scarcity societies in which material needs are met so thoroughly that traditional markets and money lose their central role.

Musk grounds the prediction in concrete engineering trajectories, Starship-scale mass to orbit, Optimus-class robots, and exponentially growing AI compute rather than pure speculation.

He has also noted practical limits: energy and mass remain scarce resources even when labor and information become abundant, which is why they, rather than abstract currency, would serve as the lasting measures of capacity and value.

Whether this future materializes on the timelines Musk envisions remains uncertain. Scaling AI, robotics, and space-based energy infrastructure faces enormous technical, regulatory, and economic hurdles.

In the near term, money, markets, and traditional measures of wealth continue to dominate daily life and investment decisions. Yet Musk's repeated emphasis on physics over finance highlights a deeper shift already underway: as computation and automation grow, the binding constraints on progress increasingly look like energy availability and material throughput rather than capital in the classical sense.

For now, the conversation sparked by Musk's latest comments serves as a reminder of how radically technology could reshape the foundations of economic value.

In a world measured by wattage and tonnage, the companies and civilizations that can most efficiently convert energy into useful work and mass into productive infrastructure would hold the real advantage.

Looking ahead, Musk's prediction that energy and mass could eventually replace money as the primary measures of economic value will depend on how far artificial intelligence, robotics, and energy infrastructure advance over the coming decades.

If automation significantly reduces the cost of producing goods and services, traditional economic models could face mounting pressure as scarcity shifts from human labour and financial capital towards electricity, computing capacity, raw materials, and manufacturing infrastructure.

The transition, however, is unlikely to eliminate money in the foreseeable future. Even in a highly automated economy, societies would still need mechanisms to allocate scarce resources, determine ownership, distribute purchasing power, and manage competing demands.

Energy and mass may become increasingly important measures of productive capacity, but their growing importance does not necessarily mean they will replace currencies or financial markets.

For investors and businesses, the more immediate implication is the growing strategic importance of energy generation, semiconductor manufacturing, robotics, and AI computing infrastructure.