The world’s richest man sits down with The Economist
|AUSTIN|6 min read
ELON MUSK, in his telling, is a modern-day Cassandra—better than most at predicting the future, but doomed to be disbelieved. “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless. And within 20 years, Britain—a country that he has not visited for years—will be engulfed in civil war.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Croesus or Cassandra?”
From the July 25th 2026 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents