"AI or SI, pardon me" will give you better healthcare than Elon Musk gets, says Elon Musk
Elon Musk has told reporters at the White House that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and humanoid robots will most likely make everyone better off. He spoke on Tuesday outside the West Wing, beside President Donald Trump, after the president’s lunch with tech leaders.
He began by praising the "positive benefits of AI, or SI, pardon me," correcting himself to Trump’s signed policy term that day.
Musk then discussed the potential for an ‘age of abundance’, where people receive a universal high income rather than a basic one. He turned to healthcare, stating: "When you have robots, and you have superintelligence, it means that everyone in the world can have better medical care than anyone here, including me."
A reporter countered, "Not if they haven’t got a job."
Musk responded, "Jobs are going to change. Jobs have always changed."
According to Peterson-KFF, Americans spent $14,775 each on healthcare in 2024, almost twice the average in comparable rich countries. Yet they live about 3.7 years less than people in those countries, and the US ranked last among 10 wealthy nations in the Commonwealth Fund’s latest ranking.
Musk compared the evolution of technology, noting that being in front of a computer used to be a job, with whole buildings full of people calculating bank interest by hand until digital machines took over. He argued nobody wants those jobs back and predicted an evolution of roles rather than mass unemployment.
This perspective aligns with Musk’s previous statements on universal high income and optional jobs, made during the 2023 AI Safety Summit in the UK to Rishi Sunak, then prime minister.
He offered no detail on how such an income would be paid for or who would pay it—a central question in the economic debate over AI. The International Monetary Fund estimates that AI will affect almost 40% of jobs worldwide and warns it will likely worsen inequality.
Musk’s upbeat forecast came weeks after he backed Dario Amodei, chief of Anthropic, in his call to slow down advanced AI work. Still, on the same day, Musk signed a voluntary safety pact for xAI alongside Trump and five other tech leaders. President Donald Trump also signed an order directing federal agencies to refer to AI as "superintelligence."
Story by Ana-Maria Stanciuc
Editor-in-Chief, TNW
I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, viability, and the future of work.