{"id":6510,"date":"2026-08-07T10:39:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=6510"},"modified":"2026-08-07T10:39:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:39:51","slug":"mukunda-what-elon-musk-doesnt-understand-abundance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=6510","title":{"rendered":"Mukunda: What Elon Musk doesn’t understand abundance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elon Musk, the world\u2019s first trillionaire, told The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minto Beddoes in a recent interview that money won\u2019t matter in 2036. He invoked a Star Trek-like future where robots and artificial intelligence will make us so wealthy that work will become a hobby like gardening and not a necessity.<\/p>\n

Read more Horoscopes August 7, 2026: Charlize Theron, set your plans in motion<\/a><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen such predictions before, and we don\u2019t have to read science fiction to know what people who don\u2019t have to work are like. Abundance can abolish want. It can\u2019t abolish the human need for status. The fight over what\u2019s left is not the idyllic world Musk predicts.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s own behavior shows just how much he cares about status. In February 2023, after his Super Bowl post drew fewer views than President Joe Biden\u2019s, the newsletter Platformer reported that Twitter brought in roughly 80 engineers overnight to build a \u201cpower user multiplier\u201d that boosted his posts by a factor of 1,000 and applied to him alone.<\/p>\n

Knowingly or not, Musk\u2019s comments echo those of economist John Maynard Keynes, who predicted in 1930 that within a century we would work perhaps 15 hours a week, and that we would be glad of \u201csmall duties and tasks and routines\u201d \u2014 gardening, for instance \u2014 to fill the time. Almost 100 years later we\u2019re still at 40 hours and often many more.<\/p>\n

Status conscious<\/h4>\n

When most of us think of a post-scarcity world, we, like Musk, envision Star Trek. But look at how Starfleet works. Competitive admission to the academy, rank insignia on every uniform, exactly one captain per ship. And I bet being a starship captain is a high-prestige job. We can see how post-scarcity people live in the real world too. At Louis XIV\u2019s Versailles, stratospherically wealthy aristocrats schemed to be the man who handed the King his shirt because that was a privilege reserved for the one with the highest status.<\/p>\n

Why do people in our post-economic class pay unfathomable sums ($6.05 billion for the Washington Commanders in 2023) to own sports franchises? Because, as one billionaire explained to another in the TV show Billions, sports franchises are \u201chow we knight people in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keynes saw this future too. In the same essay he divided human needs into absolute ones and relative ones we can satisfy only by feeling above other people. Those, he wrote, may be insatiable. In 2015, the psychologists Cameron Anderson, John Angus Hildreth and Laura Howland, then all at the University of California at Berkeley, reviewed the empirical literature and concluded that the desire for status is a fundamental human motive distinct from the desire for money or for power.<\/p>\n

The economists Matthew Rablen and Andrew Oswald, then both at the University of Warwick, showed just how valuable high status can be. They compared Nobel Prize winners in the sciences with scientists who were nominated but never won. Winning was associated with one to two extra years of life. The size of the prize made no difference. What mattered was being chosen.<\/p>\n

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Wealth trap<\/h4>\n

The wealthier you get, the more important status becomes as a motivator for work. Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst found that in the 20 years starting with the mid-1980s, men without a high school diploma gained eight hours a week of leisure while college-educated men lost six. Less than half of that gap is explained by employment rates. Aguiar and Hurst raise the possibility that less educated men simply value free time more. I\u2019d put it the other way round: The men who gave up their evenings needed the money least and wanted the standing most.<\/p>\n

Read more Asking Eric: The porch ambushes have us dreading our neighbors<\/a><\/p>\n

The danger of a society centered on status competition is that it\u2019s inherently zero-sum. Economic growth makes everyone better off. If you move up on the status ladder, someone else must move down.<\/p>\n

That may sound like a bleak future. But status hierarchies aren\u2019t facts of nature. They\u2019re built. Star Trek\u2019s Federation is a utopia because of what it rewards. As Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells a 21st century engineer in one movie, money doesn\u2019t exist in his era and \u201cwe work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.\u201d Status goes to whoever does the most for everyone else.<\/p>\n

There have been attempts to create that dynamic in the real world too. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, then one of the richest men in America, made the same argument in an 1889 essay for the North American Review remembered as the Gospel of Wealth. Carnegie urged the rich to live modestly and to direct the surplus toward universities, libraries, medical institutions and public parks. A rich man who dies rich, he wrote, will be missed by no one when he\u2019s gone. \u201cThe man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.\u201d Keynes called this too, predicting that the love of money for its own sake would come to be recognized as \u201ca somewhat disgusting morbidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The appeal of a post-scarcity society will depend on the status hierarchy it\u2019s governed by. Louis XIV tamed a nobility that had nearly overthrown him by getting men who might have raised armies to waste their energies competing over a shirt. It worked until the French Revolution came. Carnegie built one aimed at benefiting everyone, and it produced libraries. The modern heir to Carnegie\u2019s Gospel is the Giving Pledge, which asks billionaires to promise to donate most of what they have. But we\u2019re going in the wrong direction. Only one couple that signed the pledge has followed through so far, and the New York Times reports that tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who never signed, has been privately urging signatories to revoke their pledges, among them Musk, who signed in 2012.<\/p>\n

A post-economic paradise requires Carnegie-style norms. Norms like these are set from the top, because that\u2019s who everyone else is measuring against. That makes Musk the most powerful instrument available.<\/p>\n

On Monday, after the Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu challenged him to pledge his fortune to charity by 2036, Musk answered that he was \u201cactually going to do something along these lines.\u201d His foundation has missed the legal minimum for charitable giving for four years running. The promise is always in the future. Even if he\u2019s right that we won\u2019t need money in 2036, we\u2019ll still be keeping score.<\/p>\n

Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of \u201cIndispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.\u201d \u00a92026 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Harriette Cole: My brother\u2019s wife wanted to be at a hotel, so she treated my house like one<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Abundance can abolish want. It can\u2019t abolish the human need for status.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nMukunda: What Elon Musk doesn’t understand abundance - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=6510\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mukunda: What Elon Musk doesn’t understand abundance - Next City Digest\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"'Abundance can abolish want. 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