Elon Musk dropped a bombshell on the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast in early January 2026. Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years, he said. It won’t matter. If predictions about AI, robotics, and cheap energy hold true, saving for retirement becomes irrelevant. Abundance awaits. Musk envisions a world where anyone can have whatever they want—superior healthcare for all within five years, free education on any topic, no scarcity of goods or services. Work? Optional, like tending a garden for fun. But. This isn’t just optimism from the world’s richest man, worth over $600 billion. It’s a direct challenge to decades of financial advice. Musk ties it to his companies’ advances: Tesla’s self-driving cars and Optimus humanoid robots, SpaceX’s reusable rockets, xAI’s push toward artificial general intelligence. Productivity explodes. Economies balloon. Universal high income emerges—not basic, but high enough to cover every need.…