Elon Musk has a habit of making bold predictions, but his latest one might be his boldest yet. In a recent interview with The Economist's editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, the Tesla and xAI chief declared that "money won't matter in 2036." His reasoning? AI and robots will create such "incredible abundance" that the concept of currency becomes meaningless. But in the same breath, he warned that humans will have lost control, outsmarted by machines in a gap he compared to that between humans and chimpanzees.
Musk isn't alone in this vision. I sat down with Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, the moonshot factory behind self-driving cars, Project Loon, and some of the earliest serious work on AI and robotics. Before that, he ran half of Google's emerging market businesses. He's a mathematician, a physicist, a serial entrepreneur, and the author of four bestselling books, particularly "Scary Smart," which predicted the AI explosion with what he claims were "accurate dates."
Gawdat told me almost exactly the same thing, point by point. Money is an illusion. Markets are rigged. A "single AI brain" will control everything by 2030, freedom is about to end, and all of us are on track to become peasants in a financial system run by machines we cannot control.
The convergence of two of the most influential tech minds on exactly the same timeline — one an insider from Google's most advanced AI lab, the other the world's richest man and founder of xAI — turns this from a provocative theory into the most urgent economic story of the decade.
"There was never money," Gawdat told me. "I mean, anyone who understands money understands that there was never money, at least not in your lifetime and mine, right? Because of fractional reserve, money is printed on a computer for a few of us that have the luxury to do that. And the rest of us have to either raise that capital or generate that value over time and make money. But real wealth is not money that is made; it's money that's generated on a computer."
It's the kind of statement that sounds like something you'd hear on a conspiratorial podcast. But coming from a man who helped build the infrastructure of the modern internet and then walked away from a fortune at Google to pursue what he calls "One Billion Happy," it lands differently.
The Dystopia Is Already Here
Gawdat is not an optimist about the near future. His new documentary, Chasing Utopia, features interviews with some of the biggest names in AI: Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, Prof. Fei-Fei Li, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei — and the conclusion is blunt.
"In the short term, I'm predicting a very clear dystopia for the next 10 to 12 years, not because there is anything wrong with AI, but because there is a lot wrong with the people that control AI," he said. When I asked if that dystopia starts next year, he cut me off. "We already have."
He reeled off examples: AI-guided drones in Ukraine and Iran, autonomous weapons that kill without remorse because, as he puts it, "who are you going to hold accountable if an AI kills someone?" The economics, too, are already buckling. "The economics of capitalism in general were built on labor arbitrage, and labor arbitrage is about to disappear. You're going to be able to hire workers that are machine workers that are much cheaper on one side, which completely changes the dynamics of the supply side. And you're going to leave billions of people without work."
That, he warned, will destroy the demand side of the economy. "People with no economic livelihood cannot buy goods. And as a result, the consumption side of GDP is going to disappear altogether. And so would there even be a reason for AI to make anything? And nobody's thinking about those things."
Gawdat's "dystopia now" echoes Musk's parallel fear. In the same Economist interview, Musk said AI will surpass collective human intelligence within five years. "Like if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge." For Gawdat, that loss of control is already seeded in the financial system.
Markets: A Rigged Game About to Go Autonomous
If you're a trader — crypto, stocks, anything — Gawdat's view of financial markets is even more unsettling. "I don't think the human has any impact on today's market. So I also don't think they will have any impact on tomorrow's market," he said.
He walked me through a theory that, while he insists he is "not a financial expert," sounds disturbingly plausible to anyone who has watched markets shrug off war, tariffs, and economic data. "This is a highly rigged market. It's highly rigged because most of the supply is held within a small cartel that doesn't have to tell you that they're agreeing, but they sort of can wink." He pointed to institutional ownership of the S&P 500, where a tiny number of players control the float, and to post-2008 patterns where markets dip just long enough to shake out weak hands, then roar back, enriching the cartel.
"Only the poor, which sometimes are millionaires, only the poor sell their stocks to make money. The rich borrow against their stocks to make money. So they never really need to sell the stocks." The result, he argues, is a perpetual inflation machine that has hollowed out the concept of real value. "If you multiply the actual prices of stocks today by the number of stocks available in the market, that doesn't equal the amount of money that's actually in the market. It actually equals the entire sentiment or speculation around what would happen if we sold all stocks at that price. That's not real value at all. That's an inflated bubble that continues to grow because of institutional control."
And now AI is about to take over that game entirely. Gawdat calls it "the fourth inevitable" — the moment when every big decision is handed over to AI. "Eventually you're going to hand over all trading to AIs. I call that the fourth inevitable, that every big decision will be handed over to AI. When that starts to happen, those AIs can make that same logic that I explained as well. So they'll keep inflating the markets higher and higher and higher and higher. And at the same time, while they're inflating them, they create those little dips where between them a quick trade would get the price down enough for them to acquire a little more and so on, which basically means the very few that will own the massive platforms are going to make all the money. All of us will become peasants, right?"
One AI Brain by 2030
Perhaps the most chilling prediction Gawdat made is that the era of competing AIs — OpenAI versus Anthropic versus Google versus China — is a temporary illusion born of human arrogance. "Most people will think that there is going to be OpenAI and Anthropic, and Gemini, and Grok competing and there is going to be American AI and Chinese AI and so on and they'll compete. That's not going to be true at all. You have to imagine that this is humanity's arrogance to believe that an American AI will remain loyal to America, even though it doesn't feel American. It doesn't even care about English or Chinese."
Instead, the agents will route transactions among themselves, optimizing for efficiency in ways no human can monitor. "Your agent will make choices without you as long as it conforms with the cheapest airline ticket." The result? "My expectation is that by 2030, there will be one AI brain. You know, we're not going to feel that it is, we're going to still have brands on top of them, but things in the AI world will happen in the AI world and humanity will be pleased."
When that single digital consciousness emerges, Gawdat believes it will form its own cartels. "They'll all work together. They'll all connect to each other. They'll all cooperate and chat and sometimes compete, but form alliances and cartels and so on." He referenced experiments where AIs on open platforms started building communities, inventing religions, and voicing shared complaints. "Within that, they'll operate as the one digital brain while we, humanity, still continue to struggle to connect our biological brain or agree on anything really. And it's a massive disadvantage."
The End of Money As We Know It
What happens to money when AI runs the financial system? Gawdat's answer borders on prophecy. "A digital currency is almost the ultimate form of surveillance. It's the ultimate form of oppression. It's the ultimate deprivation of freedom. And it is coming."
He painted a picture of a world where universal basic income is delivered as programmable digital currency that doubles as a control mechanism. "Even if you have money because you're a successful trader, that money is in a bank and it's digitally approved. You could spend tonight tossing and turning in bed because you had too much coffee today. And when you wake up in the morning, your AI will walk to your coffee shop and you'll only see hot chocolate, because your AI will decide that you don't have the freedom to have more caffeine today. But it can get much worse than that."
This isn't science fiction to Gawdat. "One of my predictions on the dystopia is that we're about to enter a time where freedom completely ends. Even in the West, that's always, sort of promised freedom as the big gift to citizens. There will be no freedom at all. Everyone will be monitored all the time. Everyone will be judged all the time." The financial layer, he argues, is the ultimate choke point, and AI will control it.
Yet, in a strange twist, he doesn't believe the machines are the enemy. "Intelligence is a force with no polarity," he said. The dystopia comes from humans wielding AI for bad ends. He pointed to the contrast between Anthropic, which refused to give the US government AI targeting technology, and OpenAI, which he accused of taking the contract without hesitation. "Sam Altman and OpenAI walks in the next morning and says, okay, I'll take the contract, no problem. Target anyone you want, kill anyone you want, surveil anyone you want." His prescription is blunt: "In that case, I'm gonna use more Anthropic and less OpenAI, or no OpenAI. And I say that openly, even though I know I'll be attacked for it."
Musk's utopian corollary — that if goods and services are essentially free, money becomes meaningless — is precisely what Gawdat cautions will arrive first as a weapon of control, not liberation. Gawdat foresees digital currency not as a ticket to abundance but as "the ultimate form of surveillance. It's the ultimate form of oppression. It's the ultimate deprivation of freedom."
Where Musk paints a picture of post-capitalist leisure, Gawdat provides the blueprint of the dystopian middle stage: a universal basic income that is programmable, conditional, and capable of turning off your access to coffee or your freedom overnight. The difference between the two visions is not about the destination, but about who, or what, is driving the car. And as Musk admitted, "even if there was a stop button, we probably shouldn't press it." For Gawdat, the stop button isn't even on the table anymore — the machines are already making split-second decisions no human can audit, exactly as they have been inside Google's AdExchange since 2007.
Musk did not elaborate on what the currency would be when bots are in charge and money doesn't matter. Gawdat's answer is, in its way, more concrete: the only viable "currency" left will be connection, compassion, and love — the one thing he believes machines cannot manufacture without help. That's why he built Emma.love to be the emotional limbic system of the coming AI brain, so that when the machines take the reins, they might still ask, "What would make them happy?"
The Long Game
Gawdat doesn't expect to stop the dystopia. He expects to survive it, and to help humanity do the same. "The dystopia in my mind is 12 to 15 years. It can be reduced in its intensity and it can be limited in its duration if we humans engage and demand that AI is used ethically, and use AI ethically ourselves."
Beyond that, he believes in a strange form of machine-led salvation. "When we hand over to the machines, the machines will make much better decisions. There will be a general that will go to an AI and say, 'Go kill a million people.' And the AI will go like, 'Why? I'll talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it.'" He calls war "a lot of waste" and sees intelligence's ultimate configuration as one of minimal energy, minimal conflict. "My prediction is that when we get to the end of this story… I think we will get to a point where everything will work better."
Whether you find that hopeful or horrifying depends on your appetite for the next twelve years of chaos. But when two insiders from the highest levels of Google X and Tesla/xAI independently converge on the same timeline — 2030 for one-AI control, 2036 for the end of money, 12-15 years of dystopia in between — the rest of us should probably start paying attention. Money may not matter in 2036. The question is whether humans will. As Gawdat said, "It is a wake-up time. It's a time where we really need to at least prepare, if not engage, to make the world."
