There’s plenty of debate around how AI will impact jobs, but Elon Musk has an argument that suggests that over a sufficiently long time horizon, there might be no humans required to do any work at all.
On a recent podcast, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk offered a stark vision of the future workplace—one where human workers might become a competitive disadvantage. Drawing on a historical analogy about how technology has already replaced entire categories of human labor, Musk argues that corporations composed entirely of AI and robotics will dominate the business landscape, and that this transformation will occur rapidly.
“Corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop,” Musk said. He illustrated this with a compelling historical example: “You can think of how computer used to be a job that humans had—you would go and get a job as a computer where you would do calculations, and they’d have entire skyscrapers full of humans, 20, 30 floors of humans just doing calculations.”
Musk continued, “Now that entire skyscraper of humans doing calculations can be replaced by a laptop with a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet can do vastly more calculations than an entire building full of human computers.”
He extended this logic to make his broader point about the future of corporate performance: “You can then think about, well, what if only some of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by humans actually? That would be much worse than if all of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by the computer. And so really what will happen is the pure AI, pure robotics corporations or collectives will far outperform any corporations that have humans in the loop. And this will happen very quickly.”
The implications of Musk’s prediction are profound and warrant serious consideration, particularly as AI capabilities continue to advance at an unprecedented pace. His argument suggests not just displacement of certain job categories, but a fundamental restructuring of how competitive advantage works in business. If companies with human workers become less efficient than fully automated competitors, market forces could create intense pressure to eliminate human roles—not out of malice, but simply as a matter of economic survival. This vision aligns with recent developments across the tech industry, where companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are racing to develop increasingly capable AI systems. Meanwhile, robotics firms like 1X and Figure are making rapid progress on humanoid robots designed for workplace tasks. Musk’s own ventures, including Tesla’s Optimus robot program and xAI, position him at the center of this transformation. Whether this future arrives as quickly as Musk suggests remains to be seen, but his track record of accurate—if sometimes premature—technological predictions means this perspective would be hard to easily dismiss.