In the next 10 years, you might not have a job, but that might not be bad news, according to Elon Musk, who says millions of robots and smart technology automation will be doing everything for us.

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What if someone told you that you don’t ever have to work again? After your head stops spinning, you would probably ask, “But how will I buy clothes, food or pay my bills?” The answer? “Millions of robots will take care of everything for you.” Sound fetched? Last week Elon Musk predicted that optional work will be the future by 2035 or 2045. Not only will AI make work unnecessary, according to the Tesla mogul, it will make money irrelevant.

Optional Work Could Show Up On Your Doorstep By 2035

One of the biggest worries for the 2025 workforce has been landing a job in a crowded market and massive layoffs. Economic uncertainties have led workers to adopt a number of survival tactics from quiet quitting to office frogging to job hugging. But what if you lived in a world where layoff anxiety and feeling stuck in a job you hate were dinosaurs of the past?

I have written stories for Forbes.com about how artificial intelligence startups are glorifying exhaustion for the sake of productivity, adopting the grueling “9-9-6 work schedule” in an attempt to outpace the Chinese by “winning the AI race,” toiling from nine a.m. to nine p.m., six days a week. But now, thanks to AI, the future of work might actually lie in working less, not more or even not working at all, according to Elon Musk.

This is the same man who referred to ChatGPT as “One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization” in 2023 when he spoke at the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This is the same man accused of corporate slavery back in 2022 when he praised Chinese Tesla employees for “burning the 3 a.m. oil,” saying Americans are “trying to avoid going to work at all.”

And this is the same man who declared an end to remote work at his electric vehicle company, laying off nearly half of the 7,000 employees at Tesla. In my 2022 interview with Jenn Lim, the CEO of Delivering Happiness, she told me that Musk was treating people like collateral damage instead of human beings, forgetting basic human decency in the way he handled the massive layoffs.

Now, in a total reversal, Musk predicts optional work, comparing it to choosing to play sports or video games or to grow vegetables in your back yard or get them at the supermarket. And he predicts that your days of overworking, feeling stuck in a job you hate or being pressured to take on a side hustle to make ends meet will be over in the next 10 to 20 years. Robots, he predicts, will take all your job woes away, and you will be free to choose to work or not.

Curious what other leaders thought about Musk’s predictions, I did some digging and discovered he’s not alone. I spoke to Ali Gohar, CHRO at Software Finder, who told me that Musk’s idea isn’t far-fetched at all. “In 20 years, some high-skill knowledge workers will have the option to stop working thanks to automation and AI-driven software ecosystems,” Gohar says. “But millions will very likely still rely on work as a necessity. The biggest divide will almost certainly be drawn by those who can afford not to work.”

Gohar points out that we’re already seeing glimpses of Musk’s prediction in B2B SaaS. “Many roles are becoming redundant as a result of improvements in low-code platforms, AI copilots and hyper-automated back-end systems,” he explains.

Gohar asserts that what many underestimate is the extent to which AI will change our relationship with knowledge work. “Software will offload the dull and repetitive, leaving humans to focus on creativity, strategy and empathy,” he suggests. “For some, that will feel optional. For others, especially those in physical or people-facing roles, technology may transfer the pressure ‘up’ as opposed to ‘off.’”

Is Musk’s Optional Work Based On An Outdated Model?

I also spoke with Kaz Hassan, principal of community and insights at Unily, an AI-powered EX platform. He thinks Musk is measuring work based on an outdated model and fails to recognize the real value of people in the world of work.

“For the last centuries, we’ve measured work through task completion and time investment,” Hassan argues. “How many projects delivered? How many hours logged? How many emails sent? We’ve treated human contribution like machine output: quantifiable, replicable and scalable.”

Hassan believes AI will expose the fragility of this model. He points out that it excels at pattern recognition and process optimization, but it can’t replicate the messy, contextual work that drives real organizational success such as “the strategic intuition that spots market shifts before the data catches up. The cultural translation that helps a distributed workforce rally around shared purpose. The judgment-calls that balance competing priorities when there’s no obvious right answer.”

Hassan asserts that he’s seeing this firsthand with enterprise clients navigating AI implementation. “Organizations rushing to automate everything are discovering something uncomfortable: the hard-to-measure human work they undervalued has suddenly become their only competitive advantage.”

“Most organizations spent decades training employees to think of themselves as task-completers rather than meaning-makers.,” he notes. “We told people their value lay in efficient execution, with creative problem-solving being a nice to have. We optimized for productivity metrics that AI now demolishes effortlessly and many have no alternative framework for understanding their value.”

Hassan argues that we need to stop conflating automation of tasks with elimination of human contribution, adding that organizations need to radically redefine how they articulate and reward human work. “That means ditching productivity theater: the endless meetings, the performative busy-work, the metrics that measure activity rather than impact,” he insists.

A Final Takeaway On Optional Work

The performance champions in the next era won’t be the organizations that replace humans with AI, according to Hassan. “They’ll be the ones that create ‘superworkers’, who are confident in their uniquely human value and skilled at using AI agents to amplify their judgment, creativity and strategic impact,” he contends.

When it comes to optional work, Hassan believes we need to legitimize work that feels optional by old metrics but is essential by new ones. What would that look like? “The connecting. The questioning. The reframing. The cultural bridge-building that helps organizations function as coherent entities rather than collections of optimized processes,” he concludes.