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 just’ve seemingly heard earlier than. The chat was uncharacteristically subdued, particularly while you bear 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 essentially the most disingenuous.

“I’d encourage everybody to be optimistic and excited concerning the future,” mentioned Musk. “And usually, I believe for high quality of life, it’s truly higher to err on the facet of being an optimist and mistaken fairly than a pessimist and proper.”

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

On its face, declaring your self an optimist looks like 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.

In recent times, 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 grow to be multiplanetary or we’re going through an “extinction event.”

“Western Civilization is doomed, until the core weak spot of suicidal empathy is acknowledged and actions are taken which can be arduous, 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 known as xAI in 2023. Thursday, he warned concerning the form of future that you just’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 need to discover ourselves in a James Cameron film, you realize, Terminator. He’s obtained nice motion pictures, love his motion pictures, however we don’t need to be in Terminator, clearly.”

However Musk flips backwards and forwards on the specter of AI. Bear in mind again in 2023 when Musk signed a letter that known as for a pause on all AI analysis? The general public would later study 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 could 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 will likely be erased.”

They’re the form of tweets that will’ve been thought of extraordinary coming from an American public determine as just lately as a decade in the past. And when it’s not racism, it’s transphobia. Musk has disowned his personal daughter, misgendering her every 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 supposed to maintain trans customers secure. Musk welcomed again not solely the anti-trans bigots, however essentially the most hardcore conspiracy theorists and literal Nazis.

Musk positive doesn’t sound like an optimist when he talks about liberal democracies all over the world 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 obtained 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 obtained to be finished. There’s obtained 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 in all probability seems 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 surroundings. Musk ceaselessly 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 fake that environmental considerations mattered now that fascism was on the march. His corporations obtained fats on authorities subsidies, and now it was time to tug up the ladder behind him.

Musk, who’s price $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 elements of the federal government he needed to throw away. Musk bragged about sending USAID by 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 applications that he alone decided shouldn’t be funded. Notably, none of Musk’s profitable contracts for SpaceX had been minimize.

All of that is to say that Musk is all the time promoting one thing. And every little thing 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 will be interpreted as a rationalization for his gross sales ways. Arguing that “it’s truly higher to err on the facet of being an optimist and mistaken fairly than a pessimist and proper” takes on a distinct tone while 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 need to go to Mars at some point, the form of childhood dream that’s shared by lots of people. However Musk’s approach 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 perspective about Mars and house journey truly suits properly with the tone of a comic book strip that ran in U.S. newspapers from the late Fifties and early 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 as a consequence of overpopulation.

“If the earth ought to ever grow to be overpopulated, emigration to outer house could grow to be a commonplace. Bands of colonists may decide on distant planets, touring there at lightning speeds in rockets of unbelievable measurement,” the cartoon defined.

Musk is obsessive about Twentieth-century futurism, as so many people are. Nevertheless it’s arduous to name one thing just like the “House Mayflower” of 1959 optimistic, judging from the attitude 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 delivery 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 every little thing he might to destroy whereas taking a chainsaw to the federal authorities.

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