Elon Musk revealed why the economy will be 10X its size in 10 years:
1. We are already inside a hard takeoff. Every time Musk goes to sleep there is a massive AI breakthrough. When he wakes up there is another one. This is not approaching. It is happening right now.
2. AI is already building the next version of itself. Every successive model is built by the one before it. Humans are gradually being removed from the loop. Full automation of this process could arrive by end of this year.
3. The 10x economy in 10 years is his comfortable prediction. AI and robots will increase economic output by orders of magnitude. The only thing that stops it is a world war. Absent that, 10x in 10 years.
4. Human intelligence will become a microscopic minority. Not just on Earth but in the solar system. The intelligence that could run on available solar energy is so far beyond current human capacity that Musk says it will simply solve every problem humans can think of.
5. Output per person will become almost unbelievable. Tesla is not planning layoffs. They are growing their headcount. But what each person produces with AI assistance will reach numbers that are currently hard to even imagine.
6. Universal high income is coming, not universal basic income. AI and robots will produce so many goods and services so fast that they will outrun the money supply entirely. Prices fall. Everything gets cheaper. Eventually robots run out of things humans even want.
7. Money will eventually stop being relevant altogether. AI will not use human currency. It will care only about power and mass. Wattage and tonnage. Musk acknowledged the irony: just as he becomes the richest person on earth, money starts losing its meaning.
8. Everyone on earth will have better healthcare than the richest person alive today. Musk made this personal. He had neck surgery three times because the first two were done wrong. His back still hurts. He is allegedly the richest person on earth and still cannot get it fixed properly. AI solves this for everyone.
9. Optimus 3 production starts this summer. He calls it by far the most advanced robot in the world with nothing close. Slow volume this summer, high volume by next summer, a new robot design every year after that.
10. Progress in AI follows overlapping S curves. Each breakthrough looks like it will go to infinity, then hits diminishing returns, then another breakthrough resets the curve. We are not at the end of these curves. We are somewhere in the middle of a very long series of them.