Musk Isn't the First Billionaire Talking About This
The conversation started long before today's AI boom.
In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard graduates that society should explore universal basic income, arguing that people need a financial cushion to try new things as technology changes employment.
Richard Branson has made a similar argument. If AI creates enormous new wealth while eliminating jobs, he has said, some of that wealth should help provide everyone with a safety net.
AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has raised an even more uncomfortable version of the problem.
Speaking before a Canadian Senate committee in 2026, Hinton warned lawmakers to think about what happens to both unemployment and government tax revenue if AI replaces substantial amounts of human labour.
That creates a strange economic puzzle.
Governments currently collect enormous amounts of money from workers and businesses.
But what happens if there are dramatically fewer workers?
You could suddenly have millions more people requiring support while simultaneously weakening one of the tax bases traditionally used to provide it.
We've Actually Tested Giving People Free Money
This isn't entirely theoretical.
An American experiment backed by OpenResearch randomly assigned 1,000 people to receive $1,000 every month for three years, while another 2,000 received $50 monthly.
Researchers found that recipients increased spending, particularly on things such as housing, food and vehicles. They also reported improvements in financial health, although the experiment did not produce large improvements in net worth.
That doesn't prove nationwide UBI would work.
Giving 1,000 people $1,000 is very different from paying hundreds of millions of people indefinitely.
And then there's India.
Now Try Paying 1.4 Billion People
India has already seriously examined universal basic income.
Its 2016–17 Economic Survey modeled an annual payment of ₹7,620 covering 75% of the population.
Even that relatively modest proposal was estimated to cost approximately 4.9% of GDP.
Now imagine a much larger “universal high income.”
India and China each have populations exceeding one billion people. At that scale, even seemingly small monthly payments quickly become enormous government expenditures.
That's why the real debate isn't simply:
“Should everybody receive money?”
It's:
Where does the money come from?
Governments could theoretically tax AI-generated corporate profits, capital, consumption or other forms of economic activity. Payments could also be recovered from wealthy households through taxation rather than literally giving everyone the same net benefit.
But each approach creates its own economic and political problems.
There's Another Problem: Purpose
Money might replace a paycheque.
It doesn't necessarily replace a job.
Hinton made this distinction when speaking to Canadian senators. Basic income might address some financial consequences of unemployment, he said, but it wouldn't necessarily solve the loss of dignity or purpose people can experience when work disappears.
That could become one of AI's strangest challenges.
For centuries, technology has mostly helped humans produce more.
The AI revolution raises the possibility that technology could eventually become capable of producing enormous amounts without needing nearly as much human labour.
If that happens, humanity could face a question it has rarely needed to answer at scale:
How do you distribute wealth in an economy where creating wealth and having a job are no longer tightly connected?
Musk's “universal high income” is one possible answer.
Whether governments could actually afford it — particularly in countries containing more than a billion people — is a much harder question.