Bernie Sanders Agrees With Elon Musk: “I Fear He May Be Right”

Start­up entre­pre­neur, angel investor, and pod­cast­er Jason Cala­ca­n­is recent­ly spoke about AI’s impact on the U.S. work­force, par­tic­u­lar­ly on entry-lev­el jobs that Gen Z work­ers rely on to start their careers.

Cala­ca­n­is warned:

“Before 2030 you’re going to see Ama­zon, which has mas­sive­ly invest­ed in [AI], replace all fac­to­ry work­ers and all dri­vers … It will be 100% robot­ic, which means all of those work­ers are going away. Every Ama­zon work­er. UPS, gone. FedEx, gone.”

Bil­lion­aire Elon Musk, a friend of Cala­ca­n­is, respond­ed:

“AI and robots will replace all jobs. Work­ing will be option­al, like grow­ing your own veg­eta­bles, instead of buy­ing them from the store.”

[Note: After acquir­ing Twit­ter in 2022 and reor­ga­niz­ing its man­age­ment, Musk enlist­ed Cala­ca­n­is and ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist David Sacks to help run the com­pa­ny. Sacks now chairs Pres­i­dent Trump’s Coun­cil of Advi­sors on Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy.]

When an X user joked about robots pay­ing tax­es, Cala­ca­n­is replied:

“This sounds crazy right now, but a tax on robots used to tran­si­tion work­ers out of jobs will not seem crazy in 36 months.”

U.S. Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders, typ­i­cal­ly crit­i­cal of bil­lion­aires, found him­self agree­ing with Musk. He wrote:

“I don’t often agree with Elon Musk, but I fear that he may be right when he says, ‘AI and robots will replace all jobs.’ So what hap­pens to work­ers who have no jobs and no income? AI & robot­ics must ben­e­fit all of human­i­ty, not just bil­lion­aires.”

Sev­er­al X users ref­er­enced a recent Musk post:

“Work­ing will be option­al in the future. There will be uni­ver­sal high income.”

The con­cept, known as uni­ver­sal basic income (UBI), is con­sid­ered utopi­an by some. It would pro­vide all cit­i­zens a reg­u­lar min­i­mum income, poten­tial­ly fund­ed by wealth gen­er­at­ed from tech­no­log­i­cal advances—an idea Musk has long endorsed.

This per­spec­tive con­trasts sharply with cur­rent GOP poli­cies, which empha­size stricter work require­ments for gov­ern­ment-fund­ed health­care, mov­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion from Musk’s vision.