Elon Says AI Kills Money — Here's Why That's Wrong

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-22

### The Billionaire's Bold Prediction Elon Musk has a habit of dropping statements that make everyone stop and scratch their heads. His latest? That AI will eventually make money obsolete. It's a fascinating thought experiment, and honestly, it's the kind of thing that sounds incredible until you actually think it through. Harry Margulies recently took a closer look at this claim, and his conclusion is pretty straightforward: AI might create abundance we've never seen before, but it can't erase scarcity. And without scarcity, money wouldn't just become unnecessary — the whole concept would collapse. Let's unpack why. ### What Money Actually Is Here's the thing most people miss. Money isn't just paper or numbers on a screen. It's a signal. It tells us what's valuable, what's scarce, and what people are willing to trade for. Think about it this way: if everything were truly free and unlimited, we wouldn't need money. But we'd also lose the ability to make choices about how to allocate things. Who gets the first AI-generated masterpiece? Who decides which neighborhood gets the best robot-built homes? > "AI can produce abundance, but it cannot produce infinite resources. There will always be something that's limited — time, land, attention, or energy." That's the core problem with the "money becomes obsolete" argument. It assumes AI solves scarcity. It doesn't. It just changes what's scarce. ### The Scarcity Problem AI Can't Solve Even in a world where AI can generate food, art, code, and just about anything else at near-zero cost, you still run into hard limits. - **Land**: There's only so much of it. Prime real estate in New York or San Francisco isn't going to multiply just because AI got smarter. - **Energy**: AI itself consumes massive amounts of power. Someone has to pay for that. - **Time**: You can't manufacture more hours in a day. AI can't give you back your Sunday afternoon. - **Human attention**: There's a finite amount of it, and it's already the most fought-over resource on the planet. As long as scarcity exists, you need a way to decide who gets what. That's what money does. It's not perfect, but it's a system that works without requiring a central authority to make every single decision. ### Why This Matters for Startups and Investors If you're building a company — especially in the EU startup ecosystem — this debate isn't just philosophical. It has real implications. Investors are watching how AI changes value creation. If AI makes certain goods and services essentially free, the value shifts to whatever remains scarce: distribution, trust, brand, and access. For European founders, that means the playbook is shifting. It's not just about what you build anymore. It's about who you can reach, how fast you can move, and whether you can own a piece of something that can't be replicated overnight. ### The Bottom Line Elon's vision of a post-money world is compelling. It's optimistic. It imagines a future where everyone has enough. But the leap from "AI creates abundance" to "money disappears" skips over some pretty fundamental realities. Scarcity doesn't vanish because technology improves. It just moves. And as long as it exists, money — or something like it — will stick around to help us figure out who gets what. So no, Elon. AI won't make money obsolete. But it might make us rethink what money is actually for.