Elon Musk says saving money for the distant future is a total waste of time because superintelligent abundance is right around the corner 🔥 He seems right about the abundance. But if you take his advice and stop saving, you might never survive long enough to see it 💀 Quick background if you do not follow Elon closely. For years, he has been pushing Universal High Income, or UHI: a regular federal check for every single adult, no strings attached. Universal Basic Income is designed to cover the absolute basics, but UHI goes much further. It is meant to let you live exceptionally well without ever needing a job. Here is how he sees it working. AI and robots end up taking over most of the work, making employment completely optional. He has not laid out a formal funding plan yet, but the underlying logic is simple: the machines generate immense wealth, and government checks distribute it around. For that vision to come true, three things have to go right. Machines must perform most of the labor on a massive scale. That work must make goods and services dramatically cheaper. And total output has to outpace the money being handed out, or those checks will simply drive prices up through inflation. The first part is easy to accept. High productivity pushes prices down, and AI paired with robotics is productivity on steroids. Even Reason magazine, which called his UHI plan a major mistake, agreed he is almost certainly right on that specific point. Getting there is the hard part. Start with the raw numbers. The U.S. has about 270 million adults. Pay each of them $50,000 a year, and UHI carries a price tag of around $13.5 trillion. In fiscal 2026, the federal government collected $5.4 trillion in total revenue and still ran a $2 trillion deficit. Scale it down to a modest $1,000 a month, and it is still roughly $3.2 trillion annually, which eats up about 60% of all federal revenue. Even if UHI replaced every single existing federal program, the $50,000 version would cost nearly double the government's entire $7.4 trillion budget. That is why UHI simply cannot run on today's economy. It only works once those three conditions reshape the market so that every dollar stretches vastly further. And not everything gets cheaper. Robots can crank out more cars, more houses, and more food. They might even build new islands and deliver world-class teaching to every kid. What they cannot manufacture is more of the absolute best: the hottest neighborhood, the view everyone wants, or the prime spot everyone else is fighting for. Hand everyone a big check, and those finite prizes will get bid straight through the roof. Then Congress has to pass it. No UHI program exists today. One of the largest U.S. cash studies to date gave 1,000 low-income Americans $1,000 a month for three years. They covered their basic needs better and worked about 1.3 fewer hours a week, giving both supporters and critics plenty to cite. Consider that a small preview of the political showdown ahead. Now look at the timing. Elon has said work could become optional in 10 to 20 years, and he expects AI to be smarter than all humans combined by 2030. That is the technology clock. The policy clock runs much slower, and jobs can easily vanish on the first clock while the checks are still stuck waiting on the second. That gap is precisely where his advice falls apart. When your job is on the line and the checks have not shown up, savings buy you crucial time, and skills decide what you do with it. Even Elon calls abundance the benign scenario. In the bad one, as he has noted, all bets are off. I am betting on the age of abundance too. I am just building my own bridge to get there, one plank of savings and one new skill at a time. Build yours, and you will walk confidently into Elon's future instead of waiting around for it.