Elon Musk's Universal Income Advocacy Can't Be Taken Seriously
Does Musk know "universal" means "everyone"? It's unclear.
If we know anything about Elon Musk, we know he is guided by unshakable fairness and justice.
We know the richest man alive sees everyone – no matter their race, ethnicity, or creed – is fully deserving of respect and dignity. Musk values all human beings equally. In this way he is exactly like an extremely online Jesus Christ with a trillion dollars at his disposal.
Subscribe to Bad Faith Times for free or support BFT with $3 or $5 per month and join the BFT Discord
Wait. No. I was thinking of someone else. Musk is the titular head of the international fascist movement who has used his enormous resources and online presence to advance white supremacy across the western world, the guy who has transformed Twitter into a fascist radicalization machine. You may know Musk as the guy who most recently appeared to endorse a call to execute migrants coming to Europe for jobs and food and water, things of that nature.
So when Musk pushes himself into the debate over how society should handle the unprecedented scam that is artificial intelligence and says with the confidence of a child that "universal high income" is the answer, we can be sure the man is operating in eye-watering bad faith. That's way worse than normal bad faith; if your eyes are watering, you know the faith is particularly bad.
Musk is not alone in the absurdist belief that AI acceleration will create a world in which humans no longer have to toil. We will all be free to reap the magical benefits of the machine slaves we create to do the work we used to do. You'll finally get the chance to paint or draw or write or walk around in the woods and listen to the chirping birds and the slices of silence between those chirps. Our future AI utopia will allow you to be fully human, not just a worn-out cog in the capitalist machine. This is the big selling point of AI scammers who have borrowed a million trillion dollars in hopes that AI is a real thing and not one big trick played on the entire world.
"AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation," says the fascist carnival barker who has never been right about anything. Unleashing AI – a technology our tech overlords need you to equate with humanity – "will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want. The output of goods and services will be several orders of magnitude higher than today's economy."
Denny Carter
I have a question, as you probably do.
Does Musk know that "universal" means "everyone"? Maybe he does, and maybe the idea of a high universal income for people whose jobs have been displaced by robots programmed by far-right Silicon Valley chuds can fit with Musk's politics. If certain people – namely black and brown people – don't qualify as fully human, then a universal income for humans Musk considers people can work. We have at least some reason to believe this is the way the South African billionaire views the world: He recently denied that his DOGE-led coup of the U.S. government in 2025 has led to a single death, when in fact it has led to hundreds of thousands, according to rough estimates, with no end in sight.
Under Musk's fascist logic, there would be about three dozen white South African settlers who qualify for this imaginary high universal income.
We can safely dismiss Musk's calls for a universal income as incompatible with his twisted, soul-sick worldview, animated by the continued dominance of the white race in the United States and across Europe. Probably he pushes the concept of a "high" universal income to play the part of the technocratic problem solver – a reputation he enjoyed before cooking his brain on the internet and taking up the cause of his white supremacist grandfather.
Big media outlets, desperate for Musk to resume his role as the car-and-rocket guy who just wants the best for the human race, will happily report on his online ramblings about ways to address AI-driven societal upheaval without seeing such proposals through the lens of the violent white supremacy for which Musk advocates all day every day on the X platform. His laughable calls for universal income should be seen for what they are: A massive pile of bad-faith shit shoveled into mainstream discourse by the guy who owns and operates the nerve center of American politics.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
