Elon Musk Isn’t an Optimist, He’s a Salesman

Elon Musk spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, making promises about the future of robots, cars, and space travel that you’ve likely heard before. The chat was uncharacteristically subdued, especially when you remember the billionaire oligarch’s flamboyant appearances of 2025, wielding chainsaws and tossing up Nazi-style salutes. But one line stuck out during his chat on Thursday as the most disingenuous.

“I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future,” said Musk. “And generally, I think for quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right.”

Musk is trying to present himself as an optimist about the future of humanity. In reality, his public statements and actions paint a very different picture. And there’s a simple reason Musk wants to be seen as an optimist: It helps him make a lot more money.

On its face, declaring yourself an optimist seems like a reasonable thing to say and believe. But contrast Musk’s sentiment on Thursday with the rhetoric we’ve seen since he signed up to publicly support President Donald Trump in the summer of 2024, and it doesn’t really give a warm and fuzzy feeling.

In recent years, Musk has obsessed over a dark near future and said that illegal immigration was contributing to “civilizational suicide” in response to a message from the Pope; he said that the “woke mind virus” was destroying the country; he said that humanity needs to become multiplanetary or we’re facing an “extinction event.”

“Western Civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard, but necessary for survival,” Musk wrote in Nov. 2025.

Musk has spent years warning about the threat of artificial intelligence before founding his own AI company called xAI in 2023. Thursday, he warned about the kind of future that you’d find in dystopian fiction, another instance where he wasn’t painting a picture of the brightest future.

“We need to be very careful with robotics,” said Musk. “We don’t want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie, you know, Terminator. He’s got great movies, love his movies, but we don’t want to be in Terminator, obviously.”

But Musk flips back and forth on the threat of AI. Remember back in 2023 when Musk signed a letter that called for a pause on all AI research? The public would later learn he was calling for that pause while starting xAI and staffing up the company. He just wanted to slow down competitors like OpenAI, which had quite a head start. Now, Musk’s chatbot is embedded in the systems at the Pentagon. It’s all a show to sell more shit, it would seem.

The billionaire’s most bleak predictions are often his most racist. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk tweeted shortly before appearing on stage at Davos. Quote-tweeting another claim about a rise in the number of Black people living in the UK on Thursday, Musk wrote: “If this continues, entire cultures will be erased.”

They’re the kind of tweets that would’ve been considered extraordinary coming from an American public figure as recently as a decade ago. And when it’s not racism, it’s transphobia. Musk has disowned his own daughter, misgendering her whenever he talks about her in public. One of the first things he did after buying Twitter in late 2022 was to remove basic protections on the social media platform intended to keep trans users safe. Musk welcomed back not only the anti-trans bigots, but the most hardcore conspiracy theorists and literal Nazis.

Musk sure doesn’t sound like an optimist when he talks about liberal democracies around the world that oppose his far-right worldview. The UK has received special scorn from the billionaire, conjuring apocalyptic visions of a future England with mass murder in the streets.

“I really think there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. And you can’t… we don’t have another four years or whatever the next election is. It’s too long,” Musk said, speaking with far-right activist Tommy Robinson this past September. “Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”

Bringing down the British government might be “optimistic” in Musk’s book. But to most people, it probably sounds like a desire for revolution in the face of government policies he doesn’t like. Invariably, his desire is always framed in apocalyptic terms.

Then there’s his about-face on the environment. Musk frequently warns of the collapse of civilization but rarely talks about climate change. That wrinkle is actually pretty new. The billionaire used to tout his environmentalist bona fides when President Barack Obama was in office. But when Trump came onto the scene, he could clearly see the winds changing. He didn’t need to pretend that environmental concerns mattered now that fascism was on the march. His companies got fat on government subsidies, and now it was time to pull up the ladder behind him.

Musk, who’s worth $787 billion according to Forbes, donated over a quarter of a billion dollars to install Trump and his Republican allies into government. And he was rewarded with unprecedented and unlawful authority to just choose which parts of the government he wanted to throw away. Musk bragged about sending USAID through the wood chipper, dissolving an agency created by Congress that could only be abolished by Congress. But Musk did it anyway, moving on to countless government programs that he alone decided should not be funded. Notably, none of Musk’s lucrative contracts for SpaceX were cut.

Elon Musk (L) holds a chainsaw alongside Argentine President Javier Milei during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. © Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

All of this is to say that Musk is always selling something. And everything that comes out of his mouth, which may initially sound “optimistic,” needs to be understood as the work of a salesman. Even his closing line at Davos can be interpreted as a rationalization for his sales tactics. Arguing that “it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right” takes on a different tone when you remember that he’s been over-promising on countless technologies—from full self-driving to visiting Mars to flying cars—and pissing off plenty of investors in the process. He’s not failing to deliver, he’s just an “optimist,” you see?

Musk might genuinely want to go to Mars one day, the kind of childhood dream that’s shared by a lot of people. But Musk’s way of talking about it doesn’t strike me as optimistic. It’s the fantasy of a child with a lot of money, and it helps him sell himself as a dreamer.

Musk’s attitude about Mars and space travel actually fits nicely with the tone of a comic strip that ran in U.S. newspapers from the late 1950s and early 1960s, arguably the golden age of 20th-century futurism. The August 16, 1959, edition of “Closer Than We Think,” illustrated by Detroit artist Arthur Radebaugh, featured a cartoon of smiling people who had left Earth due to overpopulation.

“If the earth should ever become overpopulated, emigration to outer space may become a commonplace. Bands of colonists might settle on distant planets, traveling there at lightning speeds in rockets of unbelievable size,” the comic strip explained.

The August 16, 1959 edition of Arthur Radebaugh’s Closer Than We Think newspaper comic strip showing the Space Mayflower of the future. Scan: Novak Archive

Musk is obsessed with 20th-century futurism, as so many of us are. But it’s hard to call something like the “Space Mayflower” of 1959 optimistic, judging from the perspective of 2026.

Here in the 2020s, it seems downright utopian just to imagine a world where masked federal agents aren’t abducting preschoolers and shipping them across the country. We don’t need Musk promising that his Optimus robot will deliver a post-scarcity world where money doesn’t even need to exist. We need universal healthcare and cheaper housing, the kinds of things that Musk did everything he could to destroy while taking a chainsaw to the federal government.

If anything, the idea of a post-scarcity world should fill us with hope. But when Elon Musk is selling it, it’s hard to be optimistic.