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Last week at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, Elon Musk dropped a prediction that sounds like it was ripped straight from science fiction: within 10-20 years, work becomes optional—like tending a vegetable garden—and money stops mattering entirely. He even name-dropped Iain M. Banks' Culture novels as his template for the future.

Sounds utopian. Maybe even exciting. But here's the thing: we've heard this song before.

Musk's thesis is straightforward. Tesla's Optimus robots will eventually operate 24/7, achieve 5x human productivity, and drive costs so low that scarcity just... disappears. Instead of universal basic income, he's pitching "universal high income"—not survival-level payments, but genuine abundance for everyone.

The economic logic isn't crazy. If robots handle production with minimal marginal costs, GDP could theoretically expand by 10-100x. Poverty becomes a solved problem.

But—and this is a significant but—the centerpiece of this vision, Optimus, has already missed its targets by a factor of 10x. Musk promised thousands of units by end of 2025. Internal reports suggest Tesla has manufactured a few hundred. The original 10,000-unit goal got quietly revised to 5,000, then slipped further.

This tracks with Musk's broader prediction record. One million robotaxis by 2020? Zero deployed. Humans on Mars by 2024? Not started. Full self-driving capability? Perpetually eighteen months away.

The man identifies genuine technological trajectories—then compresses the timeline by 50-300%. It's not that he's wrong about direction. He's wrong about speed.

Here's what gets buried in the utopian rhetoric: during this supposed transition to abundance, wealth is concentrating faster, not distributing more broadly. The Magnificent Seven tech stocks are surging while everything else flatlines. Musk himself just secured a trillion-dollar compensation package—announced the same week he predicted the end of poverty.

The technology to automate work might arrive eventually. The political infrastructure to distribute that abundance? Nowhere in sight.

As economist Samuel Solomon puts it: the question isn't whether AI can transform work. It's whether anyone's building an economy where that transformation benefits more than just the people who own the robots.

The bottom line: Musk has probably identified where we're heading. He's almost certainly wrong about when we'll get there—and dangerously silent about who benefits along the way.