Elon Musk spoke on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, making guarantees about the way forward for robots, automobiles, and house journey that you simply’ve probably heard earlier than. The chat was uncharacteristically subdued, particularly while you keep in mind the billionaire oligarch’s flamboyant appearances of 2025, wielding chainsaws and tossing up Nazi-style salutes. But one line caught out throughout his chat on Thursday as probably the most disingenuous.
“I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future,” mentioned Musk. “And generally, I think for quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right.”
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 very totally different image. And there’s a easy motive Musk desires to be seen as an optimist: It helps him make a lot more cash.
On its face, declaring your self an optimist looks as if a cheap factor to say and consider. But distinction Musk’s sentiment on Thursday with the rhetoric we’ve seen since he signed as much as publicly help President Donald Trump in the summertime of 2024, and it doesn’t actually give a heat and fuzzy feeling.
In latest years, 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 mind virus” was destroying the nation; he mentioned that humanity must turn out to be multiplanetary or we’re dealing with an “extinction event.”
“Western Civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard, but necessary 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 in regards to the type of future that you simply’d discover in dystopian fiction, one other occasion the place he wasn’t portray a image of the brightest future.
“We need to be very careful with robotics,” mentioned Musk. “We don’t want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie, you know, Terminator. He’s got great movies, love his movies, but we don’t want to be in Terminator, obviously.”
But Musk flips forwards and backwards on the specter of AI. Remember again in 2023 when Musk signed a letter that known as for a pause on all AI analysis? The 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 within the techniques on 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 rapidly dying minority,” Musk tweeted shortly earlier than showing on stage at Davos. Quote-tweeting one other declare about a rise within the variety of Black individuals residing within the UK on Thursday, Musk wrote: “If this continues, entire cultures will be erased.”
They’re the type of tweets that will’ve been thought of extraordinary coming from an American public determine as lately as a decade in the past. And when it’s not racism, it’s transphobia. Musk has disowned his personal daughter, misgendering her at any time when he talks about her in public. One of the primary 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 probably 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 obtained particular scorn from the billionaire, conjuring apocalyptic visions of a future England with mass homicide within the streets.
“I really think there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. And you can’t… we don’t have another four years or whatever the next election is. It’s too long,” Musk mentioned, talking with far-right activist Tommy Robinson this previous September. “Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”
“I really think there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. And you can’t… we don’t have another four years or whatever the next election is. It’s too long.
Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”
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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Bringing down the British authorities is likely to be “optimistic” in Musk’s guide. But to most individuals, it in all probability appears like a need for revolution within the face of presidency insurance policies he doesn’t like. Invariably, his need is all the time framed in apocalyptic phrases.
Then there’s his about-face on the setting. 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. But when Trump got here onto the scene, he may clearly see the winds altering. He didn’t have to fake that environmental issues mattered now that fascism was on the march. His firms received fats on authorities subsidies, and now it was time to tug up the ladder behind him.
Musk, who’s value $787 billion in keeping with Forbes, donated over a quarter 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 via the wooden chipper, dissolving an company created by Congress that would solely be abolished by Congress. But Musk did it anyway, shifting on to numerous authorities applications that he alone determined shouldn’t be funded. Notably, none of Musk’s profitable contracts for SpaceX had been reduce.
Elon Musk (L) holds a chainsaw alongside Argentine President Javier Milei through the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. © Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP by way of Getty Images
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 will be interpreted as a rationalization for his gross sales ways. Arguing that “it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right” takes on a totally different tone while you keep in mind that he’s been over-promising on numerous applied sciences—from full self-driving to visiting Mars to flying automobiles—and pissing off loads of traders within the course of. He’s not failing to ship, he’s simply an “optimist,” you see?
Musk would possibly genuinely need to go to Mars sooner or later, the type of childhood dream that’s shared by a lot of individuals. But Musk’s manner of speaking about it doesn’t strike me as optimistic. It’s the fantasy of a little one with a lot of cash, and it helps him promote himself as a dreamer.
Musk’s perspective about Mars and house journey really matches properly with the tone of a cartoon that ran in U.S. newspapers from the late Nineteen Fifties and early Sixties, arguably the golden age of Twentieth-century futurism. The August 16, 1959, version of “Closer Than We Think,” illustrated by Detroit artist Arthur Radebaugh, featured a cartoon of smiling individuals who had left Earth on account of overpopulation.
“If the earth should ever become overpopulated, emigration to outer space may become a commonplace. Bands of colonists might settle on distant planets, traveling there at lightning speeds in rockets of unbelievable size,” the cartoon defined.
The August 16, 1959 version of Arthur Radebaugh’s Closer Than We Think newspaper cartoon displaying the Space Mayflower of the long run. Scan: Novak Archive
Musk is obsessive about Twentieth-century futurism, as so many people are. But it’s arduous to name one thing just like the “Space Mayflower” of 1959 optimistic, judging from the angle of 2026.
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 have to exist. We want common healthcare and cheaper housing, the sorts of issues that Musk did all the pieces he may 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. But when Elon Musk is promoting it, it’s arduous to be optimistic.
