Is there any similarity between Mahatma Gandhi and Elon Musk? Well, to spread it, yes. Both their lives were shaped by their time spent in South Africa. But there appears to be another common thread between the two, or at least momentarily. It seems that Elon Musk is talking about money and poverty in the same way Mahatma Gandhi once talked about the subject.

It sounds surprising, but when it comes to society’s biggest problems money and poverty, Musk, who is also the richest man on Earth, now looks more like Mahatma Gandhi rather than a modern technological utopian.

During the recent US-Saudi Investment Forum, Musk sat down with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and talked about the problem of poverty around the world. Musk claimed that the one thing humanity has consistently failed to solve is poverty. And in his belief this problem is not a social or political puzzle but an engineering problem. And there is a solution to this. Robot. With artificial intelligence becoming smarter and humanoid robots gaining more and more human-like abilities, Musk envisioned a future where the problem of poverty would be solved by these robots. However, he quipped that although poverty could be solved, the jealousy of humans could not be eliminated.

“Poverty can and will be eliminated, but envy is eternal,” Musk wrote in a post on X. These words will sound familiar and similar to many Indians. This is because we have often read something similar from Mahatma Gandhi. Yes, we are talking about that need and greed.

Gandhiji once said that humans can eliminate poverty because there is enough material on the planet for everyone’s needs. Yet, the poverty and wealth gap persists due to human greed. He famously said, “There is enough on this planet for everyone’s needs but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

Now Musk, in his Silicon Valley way, is drawing a similar notion, that scarcity is artificial, created by human nature. As a solution, Gandhi talks about moderation and Musk talks about abundance. Yet both imagine a world where material deprivation is a problem that can be solved but human nature prevents it.

Musk has the solution to end world poverty

However, this greed and jealousy is where the similarities end. Being a tech utopian, Musk has his own idea about eradicating poverty. And his solution – a rapid and deep technological revolution – is as far from Gandhi’s ideas about a village-based economy as can be.

Musk believes that it is possible to eliminate poverty in a future where robots will completely take over human labor and ultimately liberate people from poverty. On stage, he argued that AI and humanoid robots would eventually eradicate poverty altogether. His argument is simple. He suggests that if machines could do all the work cheaply and on an unimaginable scale, society could produce enough for everyone. According to Musk, previous efforts by governments and NGOs failed not because people did not care, but because they did not find a way out.

“But AI and humanoid robots will truly eliminate poverty,” he said confidently. “There’s basically only one way to make everyone rich. And that’s AI and robotics.”

Meanwhile, at the event, Musk also predicted a future where money itself would become irrelevant. He says, if machines produce everything humans need, currency disappears. Work also becomes optional, “more like playing sports or playing video games.” People may still choose to work or grow vegetables in their backyard, simply because they enjoy it.