Elon Musk Is not an Optimist, He is a Salesman

Elon Musk spoke on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, making guarantees about the way forward for robots, vehicles, and house journey that you simply’ve possible heard earlier than. The chat was uncharacteristically subdued, particularly whenever you keep in mind the billionaire oligarch’s flamboyant appearances of 2025, wielding chainsaws and tossing up Nazi-style salutes. However one line caught out throughout his chat on Thursday as probably the most disingenuous.

“I might encourage everybody to be optimistic and excited in regards to the future,” mentioned Musk. “And usually, I believe for high quality of life, it’s really higher to err on the aspect of being an optimist and fallacious moderately than a pessimist and proper.”

Musk is attempting to current himself as an optimist about the way forward for humanity. In actuality, his public statements and actions paint a really totally different image. And there’s a easy motive Musk desires to be seen as an optimist: It helps him make much more cash.

On its face, declaring your self an optimist looks as if an affordable factor to say and imagine. However distinction Musk’s sentiment on Thursday with the rhetoric we’ve seen since he signed as much as publicly assist President Donald Trump in the summertime of 2024, and it doesn’t actually give a heat and fuzzy feeling.

Lately, Musk has obsessed over a darkish close to future and mentioned that unlawful immigration was contributing to “civilizational suicide” in response to a message from the Pope; he mentioned that the “woke thoughts virus” was destroying the nation; he mentioned that humanity must turn into multiplanetary or we’re dealing with an “extinction event.”

“Western Civilization is doomed, until the core weak spot of suicidal empathy is acknowledged and actions are taken which are onerous, however essential for survival,” Musk wrote in Nov. 2025.

Musk has spent years warning about the specter of synthetic intelligence earlier than founding his personal AI firm referred to as xAI in 2023. Thursday, he warned in regards to the sort of future that you simply’d discover in dystopian fiction, one other occasion the place he wasn’t portray an image of the brightest future.

“We should be very cautious with robotics,” mentioned Musk. “We don’t wish to discover ourselves in a James Cameron film, , Terminator. He’s acquired nice motion pictures, love his motion pictures, however we don’t wish to be in Terminator, clearly.”

However Musk flips forwards and backwards on the specter of AI. Keep in mind again in 2023 when Musk signed a letter that referred to as for a pause on all AI analysis? The general public would later be taught he was calling for that pause whereas beginning xAI and staffing up the corporate. He simply needed to decelerate opponents like OpenAI, which had fairly a head begin. Now, Musk’s chatbot is embedded in the systems at the Pentagon. It’s all a present to promote extra shit, it will appear.

The billionaire’s most bleak predictions are sometimes his most racist. “Whites are a quickly dying minority,” Musk tweeted shortly earlier than showing on stage at Davos. Quote-tweeting one other declare a couple of rise within the variety of Black individuals residing within the UK on Thursday, Musk wrote: “If this continues, complete cultures shall be erased.”

They’re the sort of tweets that will’ve been thought of extraordinary coming from an American public determine as not too long ago as a decade in the past. And when it’s not racism, it’s transphobia. Musk has disowned his personal daughter, misgendering her each time he talks about her in public. One of many first issues he did after shopping for Twitter in late 2022 was to take away primary protections on the social media platform meant to maintain trans customers protected. Musk welcomed again not solely the anti-trans bigots, however probably the most hardcore conspiracy theorists and literal Nazis.

Musk certain doesn’t sound like an optimist when he talks about liberal democracies around the globe that oppose his far-right worldview. The UK has acquired particular scorn from the billionaire, conjuring apocalyptic visions of a future England with mass homicide within the streets.

“I actually assume there’s acquired to be a change of presidency in Britain. And you’ll’t… we don’t have one other 4 years or regardless of the subsequent election is. It’s too lengthy,” Musk mentioned, talking with far-right activist Tommy Robinson this previous September. “One thing’s acquired to be finished. There’s acquired to be a dissolution of parliament and a brand new vote held.”

Bringing down the British authorities may be “optimistic” in Musk’s ebook. However to most individuals, it most likely feels like a want for revolution within the face of presidency insurance policies he doesn’t like. Invariably, his want is all the time framed in apocalyptic phrases.

Then there’s his about-face on the setting. Musk regularly warns of the collapse of civilization however not often talks about local weather change. That wrinkle is definitely fairly new. The billionaire used to tout his environmentalist bona fides when President Barack Obama was in workplace. However when Trump got here onto the scene, he might clearly see the winds altering. He didn’t must faux that environmental issues mattered now that fascism was on the march. His corporations acquired fats on authorities subsidies, and now it was time to drag up the ladder behind him.

Musk, who’s value $787 billion in accordance with Forbes, donated over 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} to put in Trump and his Republican allies into authorities. And he was rewarded with unprecedented and illegal authority to only select which components of the federal government he needed to throw away. Musk bragged about sending USAID by means of the wooden chipper, dissolving an company created by Congress that might solely be abolished by Congress. However Musk did it anyway, shifting on to numerous authorities packages that he alone decided shouldn’t be funded. Notably, none of Musk’s profitable contracts for SpaceX had been reduce.

All of that is to say that Musk is all the time promoting one thing. And all the pieces that comes out of his mouth, which can initially sound “optimistic,” must be understood because the work of a salesman. Even his closing line at Davos could be interpreted as a rationalization for his gross sales techniques. Arguing that “it’s really higher to err on the aspect of being an optimist and fallacious moderately than a pessimist and proper” takes on a special tone whenever you do not forget that he’s been over-promising on numerous applied sciences—from full self-driving to visiting Mars to flying vehicles—and pissing off loads of traders within the course of. He’s not failing to ship, he’s simply an “optimist,” you see?

Musk may genuinely wish to go to Mars in the future, the sort of childhood dream that’s shared by lots of people. However Musk’s method of speaking about it doesn’t strike me as optimistic. It’s the fantasy of a kid with some huge cash, and it helps him promote himself as a dreamer.

Musk’s angle about Mars and house journey really matches properly with the tone of a comic book strip that ran in U.S. newspapers from the late Nineteen Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, arguably the golden age of Twentieth-century futurism. The August 16, 1959, version of “Nearer Than We Assume,” illustrated by Detroit artist Arthur Radebaugh, featured a cartoon of smiling individuals who had left Earth resulting from overpopulation.

“If the earth ought to ever turn into overpopulated, emigration to outer house might turn into a commonplace. Bands of colonists may choose distant planets, touring there at lightning speeds in rockets of unbelievable dimension,” the caricature defined.

Musk is obsessive about Twentieth-century futurism, as so many people are. However it’s onerous to name one thing just like the “Area Mayflower” of 1959 optimistic, judging from the angle of 2026.

Right here within the 2020s, it appears downright utopian simply to think about a world the place masked federal brokers aren’t abducting preschoolers and transport them throughout the nation. We don’t want Musk promising that his Optimus robotic will ship a post-scarcity world the place cash doesn’t even must exist. We want common healthcare and cheaper housing, the sorts of issues that Musk did all the pieces he might to destroy whereas taking a chainsaw to the federal authorities.

If something, the thought of a post-scarcity world ought to fill us with hope. However when Elon Musk is promoting it, it’s onerous to be optimistic.