While it’s doubtful that Tesla CEO Elon Musk — the world’s richest person by a long shot, as Forbes detailed — will have to worry too much about a comfortable retirement plan, he nonetheless can be seen as a source of financial wisdom when it comes to the fundamentals of wealth.
Specifically speaking, Musk recently made headlines for a perhaps grandiose claim regarding conventional retirement wisdom. He advised his audience, as he appeared on the “Moonshots with Peter Diamandis” podcast, to forget about putting cash away for retirement in 10 or 20 years — “It won’t matter,” Musk said, as the continual rollout of AI technologies will eventually create an era of abundance providing “universal ‘you can have whatever you want’ income.”
Despite Musk’s sunny projections of the future state of retirement, he has dispensed a few other financial tidbits that might be of interest for retirees (and soon-to-be or would-be retirees) to consider, should the more optimistic path not materialize. Let’s take a look.
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In a previous X thread, Musk suggested that it was far better to hold assets such as real estate, cryptocurrency or stock in companies which — at least to your mind — make good products as opposed to holding on to your savings in cash.
At the same time, less than a year later, Musk also noted that it was important to keep at least an emergency fund of cash on hand, as reported by Seeking Alpha, instead of going “all-in” on singular investments during a period of market volatility, particularly given the need for retirees or those nearby to have some liquidity in case of emergency.
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Musk famously referred to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme during a 2025 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” noting that increased life expectancy and a lower birth rate was creating an untenable fiscal situation. The Tesla CEO suggested that the situation was only worsening.
While this may not affect today’s retirees too much, those with a few (or many) years to go before entering into retirement might take heed of his advice, building other supports in the interim — hopefully without resorting to Musk’s earlier-life strategy of having to rely entirely upon beans, hotdogs, rice and oranges to scrape by, as he said in an episode of StarTalk.
