Elon Musk in the Oval Office. (Screegrab from White House video posted to YouTube.)
I have no idea how smart or stupid Elon Musk actually is. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t do IQ testing. But like everyone else in the world, I can evaluate the logic of the things he says. And there ain’t much there.
Apparently, Elon Musk is now babbling something about how we need the government to provide a universal high income because AI will take all the jobs. The idea of universal high income is a contrast with the universal basic income plan that many have put forward, which would ostensibly provide enough money for people to afford basic necessities. Musk is saying that the income provided by a government payment should be enough to support a comfortable standard of living.
This is an interesting idea. If AI really does have the enormous productivity windfall Musk is apparently anticipating, it might be a good thing to do. We can alternatively have much shorter workweeks, longer vacations, and higher pay, but let’s not get too technical.
The bigger question about Elon’s big idea is how he reconciles it with his often–repeated assertion that the U.S. government is going bankrupt. Musk claims that the deficit and debt are so large that the country can’t possibly bear them much longer. He says that we need large cuts to Social Security and Medicare to keep the government solvent.
If it’s not obvious to everyone already, these views are 180 degrees at odds with each other. If we have enough money sitting around to pay people a universal high-income, then we surely have enough money to pay people the Social Security and Medicare benefits they are expecting and paid for. It’s probably also worth mentioning that if we really thought that we need to reduce the deficit, we could tax people like Elon Musk more and/or reduce the size of the government contracts we are giving him.
Anyhow, we have Elon Musk simultaneously saying that we are richer than we can possibly imagine and that we are so poor we can’t pay the basic benefits that tens of millions depend upon to support them in retirement or due to disability. This isn’t the first time Musk has spewed utter nonsense.
Last year, when he was playing DOGE master, he insisted that 20 million dead people were getting Social Security benefits. While one dead person was uncovered, the other 19,999,999 are still free. The claim is utterly absurd on its face.
There surely are a small number of cases where a few checks get sent out after someone dies. These would barely make a dent in the cost of the program. Furthermore, much of the money is later recovered.
Musk also has repeated lunatic claims about millions of non-citizens voting. This claim, which Donald Trump also likes to make, defies common sense at both ends. The overwhelming majority of non-citizens in the country want, first and foremost, to be able to stay here to work and ultimately to gain legal citizenship.
How many of these people would risk everything to cast a vote in an election? In every election, there are tens of millions of citizens who have every right to vote, who decide it’s not worth their time. Elon believes that there are millions of non-citizens who would risk everything to cast an illegal vote?
On the other side, we have had Republicans yelling about non-citizens voting for more than a quarter- century. In all that time, maybe they have found a few dozen non-citizen voters. (There is a larger number, although still very small, who seem to have mistakenly registered. The overwhelming majority of these people never cast a vote.) We know that Trump and his crew are not very sharp, but if there were really millions of non-citizens voting in every election, even they would be competent enough to find ten or twenty thousand.
But getting back to the basic economics, what does Musk think he’s saying when he says the government will go bankrupt? The government prints the currency it spends. There is a story where we could be spending and printing so much money that we get runaway inflation, but we are obviously very far from that now, even with the burst of inflation from Trump’s tariffs and war. And even runaway inflation is not bankruptcy. Does our DOGE master really know that little about government finance?
Anyhow, Musk obviously runs off his mouth to advance whatever goal suits him at the time. Whatever he may think about the world, his comments often make no sense and are frequently contradictory. They do not deserve to be taken seriously.
The famous line, “if you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart,” could have been written for Elon Musk.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
