Elon Musk Said AGI Would Arrive by 2025. Now He Says 2026.

Elon Musk posted on X that there will be no poverty in the future and no need to save money because universal high income is coming. The same week, he told xAI staff that AGI could arrive by 2026. Last year he said AGI would arrive by 2025. We break down what Musk actually said, why his predictions keep slipping, and what happens when the richest person on the planet keeps promising a post-scarcity future that never quite arrives on schedule.

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Episode Transcript

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So one second of your time to hit the subscribe button right
now would help the show tremendously.
Thank you so much. Elon Musk posted on X that there
will be no poverty in the futureand no need to save money.
He said there will be universal high income for everybody on the
planet now. He was responding to Ray Dalio,

(01:30):
who had just announced a $70 million pledge to help fund
savings accounts for newborns under a new Trump administration
program. Musk called it a nice gesture,
but essentially unnecessary because AI and robotics will
eliminate poverty entirely. In the same week, Musk told ex
AI staff that artificial generalintelligence could arrive as

(01:53):
early as 2026. He said by 2026, which means
that we have a week before AGI hits.
Apparently said the same thing last year, except that time he
said AGI would arrive by 2025. So what happens when the richest
person on the planet keeps promising a post scarcity future
that never quite arrives on schedule now?

(02:16):
Musk has been making these predictions for years.
The timelines always shift. The framing stays exactly the
same, though, and today we're going to cover what he actually
said about universal high income, why he thinks work will
become optional, what AGI actually means, and why his
predictions keep slipping, and any of this, if any of this

(02:36):
actually matters. And you know, we're going to
talk about that right after thisshort break.
Now, Musk's comment about universal high income came in
response to Ray Dalio's announcement on X Daleo, who's
the founder of Bridgewater Associates, said he and his wife
Barbara will contribute $250 into savings accounts for
roughly 300,000 children in Connecticut.

(03:00):
It's a lot of money for people that don't have a lot of money
now. The accounts are part of a pilot
program called Trump Accounts, created by the One Big Beautiful
Bill Act, and each account starts with a $1000 government
contribution for children born between January 2025 and
December 2028. Michael and Susan Dell had
already applied $6.25 billion towards the same program.

(03:24):
You know. Musk's response dismissed the
entire premise he wrote. It is certainly a nice gesture
of The Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future and so
no need to save money. There will be universal high
income. Now, Universal high income is
not the same as universal basic income.
Musk has been explicit about thedifference At the Viva Tech
conference in Paris last year. He said the most likely outcome

(03:47):
of AI development is that none of us will have jobs.
Not because of mass unemployment, but because AI and
robotics will handle all productive tasks.
Said there will be no shortage of goods and services.
Everyone will have a high incomeand not just enough to survive.
Now Musk has added context to this.
He said that in a future where anyone can have anything, money

(04:09):
itself becomes unnecessary. If AI and robotics can satisfy
all human needs, money is no longer required.
As a system for allocating labor, its relevance declines
dramatically. He suggested that over the long
term, work would function like ahobby.
If you want to do a job, you can, but the robots will provide

(04:30):
whatever you need regardless. Now, the AGI prediction fits
into that same framework of Musk.
AGI stands for Artificial General intelligence.
AGI would mean AI that can matchor exceed human cognitive
abilities across any task. Not narrow AI that plays chess
or writes marketing copy for you, but a system that can

(04:53):
reason, learn, and adapt the waythat we do as humans do.
And some people define it as a form of self-awareness, others
define it as AI that can performany intellectual task a human
can. There's no single really agreed
upon definition here. What makes these predictions?
It's very hard to verify these. And in May of 2024, someone

(05:14):
asked Musk on X how long until AGI arrives.
He replied next year. So that was 2024.
He said it's going to happen in 2025.
We're now in 2025, December AGI isn't here and it's not going to
happen in the next few days. So next week or this week.
Musk actually told XAI staff that AGI could be achieved
within the next couple of years,maybe as soon as 2026.

(05:37):
So his timeline before slipped by exactly 1 year.
He said 2025 and 2024 and now 2026 and 2025, possibly same
thing that he's doing with full self driving.
You know, it's the Musk marketing machine.
The three MSI like to call the Musk marketing machine, which is

(05:58):
Elon Musk saying things will be here in about a year.
Or sometimes if there is a, a launch for Starship, he'll say
you know what, it'll be here in two weeks or two months.
He's just puts out a hypothetical timeline that makes
him feel good and makes people that are interested in the
projects that he's working on feel good.

(06:19):
So if you promise something and you never deliver it, you can
always say, well, I told you so in the, you know, if you look
back on the past, like, you know, I was wrong in 2024-2025,
20262027 about AGI. And when it happens in 20-30,
you say like, hey, told you so, you know, I might have been
wrong about the date, but it's also like, you know, those
people and we've all seen these people, right?

(06:40):
I'm going to go from a little tangent here.
And you know where I'm going with this people on the street
corner that the rapture is coming and Jesus is kind of come
on the weekend or whatever. And you know, and so be ready
for the rapture. And these people, they always
get it wrong. The rapture never came.
They're not prophets. They're not here because Jesus

(07:01):
or God told them to come down and tell us all.
That's what Elon Musk is doing. It's the same playbook.
I'm not saying anything about Jesus or God or heaven or
anything like that with Elon Musk.
What I'm saying is he keeps postponing his dates because he
keeps getting it wrong. I have the most popular Elon
Musk podcast in the world and I'm the person that can tell you

(07:25):
how many times Elon Musk has said something about Starship.
Because I spent about a year on the ground to Starship on the
side, Hwy. 4 and 104° heat covering Starship development.
And every time Elon would make an announcement, it would be,
we're going to get this thing out by September, right?
I moved my whole life because I believed in Elon Musk.

(07:48):
And I'm not a hater of Elon. I think he does great work.
I think he's a little delusionalsometimes and he thinks a little
wonky. But I'm here to be critical of
the men as well. So if he says 2026, take it with
a grain of salt. That's all I'm saying.
September of whatever it was whenever I was at star base.
He did not launch Starship for another year at least.

(08:11):
So just saying that it doesn't have enough timelines are worth
digging into that deep. He just says some things.
Hey, it'll happen in a couple years or maybe it'll happen in a
year. He's optimistic, you know, So,
you know, he told Joe Rogan alsoin October that he would
demonstrate a flying car by the end of this year.

(08:35):
That full self driving software has been promised as truly
autonomous for years. He said in 2019, the Tesla would
have 1,000,000 robo taxis on theroad by 2020, and that was in
2019. And we're just getting them a
little bit now. We don't have a million robo
taxis. We have like 20 robo taxis,

(08:56):
maybe 100, you know. So the predictions are
generating an attention for him and it's also a good way for him
to get investors. So anybody that wants to invest
in XAI, if he keeps saying a year from now we're going to get
AGI. And if he's the one saying it,
XAI seems like the plan that youwant to go with, right?
2026 AG is come in and you know who's going to get it?

(09:17):
XAI and Elon. So you want to invest in his
companies and you want to investin Tesla because it's part of
XAI. You want to invest in the IPO of
SpaceX. When it happens at the end of
next year, possibly, we're goingto see what happens there.
Google's going to make a bunch of money from that, by the way,
and it's going to be a game changer for a lot of people.

(09:38):
If I were a betting man and don't take my advice for this
because I don't want you to takeany financial advice for me.
This is just hypothetical. If I were you, the a good way to
make a little bit of money off this potential SpaceX sell is to

(09:59):
buy Google stocks now by Alphabet now, because when
SpaceX goes public, any part of it goes public, the Alphabet
stock is going to rise. So not that's not advice for you
to invest with. That's just what I'm going to be
doing. So that's my own personal thing
that I'm going to be doing. So this is a, there's a business

(10:21):
reason for what Elon Musk says to XAI is raising 20 to $30
billion per year in funding. And we've asked them for it,
asked them for a comment about that and why they're trying to
get that much money. Basically server farms, XAI, we

(10:41):
contacted them as well. They didn't say anything.
So the perpetual promise of AGI continues to drive investment in
X AI, Perpetual AGI just talk about it.
Sam Allman does it. All of them do it.
Hey, guess what, man? AGI is right around the corner.
It is not. It's not.
It's not right around the corner.
I wish it were. That would be great.

(11:03):
But our robot overlords are not going to be part of our system
anytime soon. The robots can barely walk.
You can push them over. Their hands don't work yet.
Elon says Tesla is working on the hands.
And I cannot wait to see that, to be honest with you.
It's going to be amazing if it actually works.
I think that'll be crazy cool. So the investment is propping up

(11:25):
a significant portion of the US economy right now too.
So anything Elon can say will prop up the US economy, will
prop up those multi billion dollar AI companies.
So also, what do we know right now about this?
Musk's predictions about the endof poverty?
Guess what? Henry Ford also said this too,

(11:48):
way back in the day when he started building Ford Motor
Company. He said once robotics and
autonomous building happens, none of us will work.
It's happened throughout time. People have said this so many
times, like, hey, guess what? If we build this invention, if
we do XYZ, no one will have any worries ever again.

(12:09):
But guess what? We're people.
Everybody wants to do something,right?
And if somebody makes a robot that can do a chore, there's
somebody out there that thinks they can make a better robot
than that first person, Henry Ford.
But you know, he, he popularizedthe automobile.
Guess where we are now, right? Wright Brothers flight, sending
things to Mars. Now we're sending things in the

(12:30):
outer solar system worth sendingthings far, far away from Earth.
Because people were more competitive.
They knew that they can make a builder or build a better plane.
So now they built a better rocket.
And now SpaceX is also building a better rocket.
So kudos to everybody is SpaceX,by the way, for all the hard
work they put into that. And Starship very close to my

(12:51):
heart, Starship and star based down there.
So everybody down there, kudos to you.
Good job everybody at SpaceX too.
So, so you would be vulnerable to automation once this all
happens, right? If AGI happens and if Tesla

(13:13):
robots take over, you're going to be vulnerable to automation
because if you work in any of these factories or if you work
in a physical environment where you have to use your body
repeatedly, it's a repeated thing.
If you do basically the same thing all day long.

(13:33):
I know my industry was turned upside down.
I was a front end coder for about 6 years and my industry
was taken over by AI, automated vibe coding, basically.
I do it now, it's fun, I think it's great.
But the plan for full automation, full AGI, because
once AGI hits, they're just going to be as smart as us.

(13:55):
They're going to be able to makethe same decisions as us.
And then eventually they'll get better than us at certain
things, but it's going to take awhile.
Things don't happen overnight, things don't happen in two or
three years. Sure, the pace is crazy right
now and we're seeing a lot of chat bots.
We're not really seeing a ton ofmovement in the AGI space

(14:15):
because there's no world view tothe large language models as of
right now, other than in robotics.
I think robotics is going to be the next big thing too, by the
way, so just take my word for that one.
There's skepticism. Worth noting though, when the
richest person on the planet is worth over $600 billion.
Tells everyone else not to bother about saving money, to

(14:39):
think about this. There's a gap between his
position and there's, if he has 600, if he's worth $600 billion,
and if he leverages some of his stock and goes like, you know
what, I'm worth 600 billion. Let me take 10 billion of this
money and then I'm just going togive it to everybody.
And most people would be really happy with what they got, right?

(15:01):
They'd be very happy with the amount of money they got.
What if he took out $100 billionout of his, out of his earnings,
out of his stock leverage that $100 billion.
Give that to everybody. Give that to everybody in the
United States. We don't have to work anymore.
We're high value people. Maybe in my math's a little bit
off there. Maybe we won't have to work as
much. But why doesn't he just do that

(15:23):
instead of building robots? But also, I've been watching
Foundation and I understand where he's coming from.
He's not hairy. He thinks he, I think what he
thinks. He's building a foundation where
he's going to keep the light of consciousness on, on Mars.
It's just like Harry Selden did,keep the light of consciousness,

(15:44):
stop the, you know, stop the downfall of humanity, etcetera,
by doing great things. And instead of just giving
people money, which would just save everybody a lot of
heartache, right? People that don't actually have
the money to pay the rent or paytheir car payment, their car
gets repossessed by their kids food.

(16:04):
Elon, you got more money than everybody else.
It would be nice if you took some of that money and gave it
to people because if you would just want people to be high
earners, then let them be high earners.
There you go. I don't know, it makes, it's a
moral conundrum for a lot of people.
But then you could say, well, that $100 billion that he spends
on all those people, he needs that to run his company.

(16:27):
So eventually we all never have to work again.
That could be 30 years from now,40 years from now.
And if you're 30 years old rightnow and it's 40 years away,
you're 70 years old, you're not going to be working anyway.
If you're 4550 years old and it's 20 years old from now,
you're going to be 60 or 70 years old anyway.
So think about that. I don't know, There's a, there's

(16:49):
a fine line between the things that Elon says and the things
that make sense. You know, like, I, I understand
what he's doing. It's like for the very long
term, right? The very, very long term of
humanity. He wants to make sure that
everybody has whatever they needforever.
Or since he's worth $600 billion, he could be worth a

(17:11):
trillion dollars in the future. If all the Tesla stuff works, if
AGI happens, if his robots work,if he can get enough customers
for Starship and etcetera, etcetera, he could be worth a
trillion dollars. One person, one person over a
trillion dollars. Just give everybody else some
money, buddy. That's all I need to pay.
Pay a lot of taxes. I know he pays the most taxes
anyone's ever paid, but you know, is he doing, is he doing

(17:34):
enough? I want you to think about that
too. Be a skeptic for a little bit.
Don't just, you know, hug the guy and kiss the guy, you know,
be like, hey, dude, you have a lot of money and if you're well
off, that's great. You don't need it, right?
If you're if you're a high earner, just don't listen to me.
You don't need it with all thoseother people that are listening
that barely scraped by, the onesthat barely have any money right

(17:55):
now and the people they have no resources because of a where
they grew up. And that's a thing you have to
think about that too. If you're skeptic about that.
I grew up with nothing. Literally.
There's no way out. There's no way.
Once you turn and you're a kid, there's zero way out if your
parents can't get out, right? So you rely on your parents

(18:17):
until you're 18. You can make your way out when
you're 18, but when you're a kid, you can't do anything about
it, right? So my dad was working his ass
off and making just enough moneyfor all of us three kids to get
by. We couldn't get out of there.
He's making OK money, you know, wasn't making a lot of money,
but he's making enough so we could all survive.
But there's no way out. He's living paycheck to

(18:39):
paycheck. We all were.
So there's in there, you know, there's millions of other people
that are well, well, worse than what we were, like way worse.
They're start literally starving.
Give them the money. So something about that, like be
really like, really look into yourself.
Like, man, is he being selfish with this or is he actually is

(19:03):
his mindset? I'm going to help everybody on
the planet Earth by building robots and getting AGI to a
place that can help everybody. Is that what he's really doing?
So you know, Musk's advice mightbe easier to follow if you
already have generational wealth.
The theory of universal high income sounds different coming

(19:25):
from someone who will be fine. He's going to be fine forever.
His kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids
will be fine. Everyone's going to be fine in
his family line forever in. So this is funny to hear too.
Elon Musk says the transition will be painful.
Not for him, he said there will be much trauma and disruption

(19:46):
along the way. Right.
Rapid automation can send millions of people into
unemployment before the promisedabundance arrives.
So if robots take over all thesejobs, people have nothing else
to do. Learn a different skill, of
course, do something else. Of course, people have always
done that. We've always found other ways to
make money and other ways to find resources.
Now the question he keeps returning to is an economic It's

(20:10):
existential. If computers and robots can do
everything better than you, doesyour life actually have meaning?
You know it it is that going to be important?
You know what, If I just had money, I would probably find
something to do. You know, there's there's got to
be something for me to do. I can't just sit on the beach

(20:31):
and sip a cocktail all day. That's boring.
So Elon's timeline for AGI keepsmoving.
The timeline for universal high income is undefined.
It used to be universal basic income, but he switched over to
universal high income instead. And Elon keeps making
predictions that generate more and more headlines and more and
more money for his companies, And when the deadline passes, he

(20:54):
sets another one. Now, whether any of this
reflects genuine confidence in the tech or serves a different
purpose is something everyone has to decide for yourselves.
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