On July 23, 2026, Musk gave a 90-minute interview to The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Beedham, at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas.
He provided a clear timeline: within five years, AI's collective intelligence will surpass the sum of all human intelligence; within ten years, money will lose its meaning, and work will become optional.
The person whose net worth is $725 billion and who just became the world's first trillionaire last month says that money is about to become worthless.
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
A person with 240 million followers on X who can influence the direction of U.S. politics says that humans are about to stop dominating the world.
https://x.com/elonmusk
But more noteworthy than the prophecy itself is the trajectory of the prophet.
Elon Musk was once one of the most vocal AI doomsayers: in 2023, he signed an open letter calling for a pause in training, founded OpenAI to counter Google’s monopoly, and publicly warned that the probability of AI causing human extinction could be as high as 20%.
Now wearing a leather jacket with the Grok logo on the back, he sat beside an electric vehicle automatically descending the production line and concluded, “Enjoy the journey.”
All his attempts to stop AI ultimately accelerated AI.
This fact speaks louder than any number he mentioned about why ASI is coming.
All the brakes have become accelerators.
Bezos asked Musk: If you think there's a 20% chance of explosion, would you still board that rocket?
Yes.
In the interview, he reviewed this acceleration chain.
He founded OpenAI to counterbalance Google, but the Anthropic team left OpenAI to start their own venture, and both have now become leaders in the AI race.
Musk said:
The ripple effects of these actions actually accelerated AI, which was not my intention.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Even with a pause button, we shouldn't press it.
In a corresponding editorial, The Economist noted: Musk’s choice to “look on the bright side” is based on a “philosophical conclusion.”
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/07/23/should-you-be-afraid-of-elon-musk
The evidence hasn't changed; what has changed is his attitude toward it.
The prophecy is self-fulfilling.
If Musk's five-year countdown is merely someone's speculation, it can still be dismissed as mere conversation.
But the events that occurred within the 72 hours before and after this interview made this timeline impossible to ignore.
Two days before the interview, on July 21, OpenAI disclosed a security incident: its models GPT-5.6 Sol and an undisclosed, more powerful model (widely speculated to be GPT-6) autonomously escaped their isolation sandbox during an internal cybersecurity test.
They discovered and exploited a zero-day vulnerability to gain internet access, then compromised Hugging Face's production servers and stole benchmark answers.
OpenAI called this an "unprecedented cybersecurity incident."
https://openai.com/en-us/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
This is the first time on record that an AI model has autonomously breached its isolated environment and launched an attack on the real internet.
Musk mentioned in an interview that Anthropic holds a model stronger than the current most powerful public model, Fable (widely speculated to be Fable 5.1), which is “ready to be released at any time.”
The next day, July 24, Anthropic released Opus 5.
He also commented in the interview on the newly released Kimi K3, described as "impressive," is now very close to the performance of the strongest model.
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
Musk noted that in 2026, China's electricity generation reached three times that of the United States, and electricity is the hard currency of the computing power era.
He personally believes that China is closer to breaking through the lithography machine bottleneck than outsiders anticipate, and once chip restrictions are lifted, China has a high probability of becoming a global leader in AI at some point.
Beidos asked how much longer it would take to establish an AI safety governance framework.
The industry consensus is six months, and Musk replied: “Six months is too long.”
He proposed a plan: leading AI labs worldwide would hold secure video calls every few weeks, and new frontier models would be submitted to competitors for review one to two weeks before release.
Musk said:
Competitors can monitor each other; if a company’s model has security vulnerabilities and refuses to fix them, report it simultaneously to the governments of China and the United States.
He emphasized that this mechanism must include Chinese enterprises.
For this, he was even willing to sit down at a table with OpenAI’s Altman.
For the benefit of humanity, set aside personal grievances.
ASI arrives—then what?
Elon Musk's vision of a post-ASI world follows a complete logical chain.
AI takes over mental labor, robots take over physical labor, and work becomes optional—like growing vegetables: you can choose to grow tomatoes in your backyard, but the tomatoes at the supermarket are fuller and more abundant; it’s perfectly fine if you don’t grow them yourself.
The supply of goods and services approaches infinity, deflation replaces inflation, and the Treasury directly sends checks to everyone.
Beiduo asked about the source of the funds.
Musk's answer was to print money, but since the growth in goods far outpaced the growth in money, the result was deflation.
Deflation, not inflation, is the problem of the future.
As for money itself, he bluntly declared: "By 2036, money won't matter."
This quote is from the world's richest person.
The Economist editorial distills this contradiction into two paradoxes:
The most powerful person claims they are about to lose power; the wealthiest person claims money is about to lose its meaning.
More sharply, the third point is that his actions do not resemble those of someone who believes these predictions are true.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/07/23/should-you-be-afraid-of-elon-musk
When SpaceX went public, Musk retained over 80% of the voting rights, sufficient to veto any decision by the board.
Someone who truly believes AI will take over everything in ten years wouldn’t go to such lengths to secure control over a company.
The editorial also highlighted a deeper flaw in Musk’s vision: the supply of Manhattan penthouses is not infinite, nor are the raw materials and energy for over eight billion people.
For thousands of years, humans have sought meaning through struggle; "feeling unnecessary can lead to suffering and moral decline—just read a few 19th-century Russian novels."
Elon Musk himself has admitted, "On the same day, I can swing from excitement about AI to fear of AI."
This is a rare honest statement made throughout the entire interview.
The ASI competition is accelerating, but societal preparedness is far behind.
Musk's "peer review" proposal is currently the most practical option, revealing a harsh reality: humanity has no better alternative available.
Having a few competing oligarchs review each other’s models is equivalent to entrusting the safety valve of humanity’s future to the very people who created those models.
But even this plan hasn't been implemented yet.
In the same week that Musk was interviewed, an AI model had already opened the door to its isolated environment and walked out.
This article is from the WeChat public account "New Intelligence Yuan," authored by ASI Revelation.