Elon Musk expects conventional money to stop mattering one day. The panel on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis spent part of its October 21, 2026 episode, which was recorded the day before, asking what would take its place. The conversation produced three answers. Musk pointed to physical quantities such as energy and mass. The guest, Chamath Palihapitiya, favored tokens tied to compute and power. Alexander Wissner-Gross suggested that superintelligence could make currency itself much less useful.
Musk: currency in watts and tons
Peter Diamandis, the show's host and the founder of XPRIZE, played clips from Walter Isaacson's interview with Musk on the program Builders, which was released October 20, 2026. Isaacson asked whether the world is heading toward a post-capitalist economy. Musk said there would still be currency, but it would be counted in basic physical terms: power, energy and mass. "Conventional currency will not matter in the future," he said. He added that he thought this was "pretty obvious."
His reasoning was about scale. Once an economy grows many orders of magnitude (many factors of ten) larger than Earth's, meeting human needs gets easy. At that size, he said, providing people "whatever goods and services they can think of that they might want is trivial."
Then the question turned to what would give humans meaning. "I do struggle with this question," Musk said. He guessed that people would find ways to be happy, much as retirees seem fairly content without working. He also said that "there won't be anything that humans can do that the AI and the robots can't do better." Elsewhere in the full interview, he compared that future to gardening, which people choose to do even though easier ways to get food are readily available.
Diamandis took the idea a step further. If currency is measured in watts and tons, he said, "whoever owns the power plants, the mines, and the rockets owns the money supply," and today "it's a pretty short list." He turned to Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who founded and runs Social Capital and co-hosts the All-In Podcast. Diamandis noted that Palihapitiya had locked up nearly six gigawatts of power and asked whether he was holding humanity's future currency.
Palihapitiya: value with energy burned into it
Palihapitiya said he was "very aligned" with Musk and offered what he called a "less eloquent" version of the idea. His argument was about fiat currency, which is money whose value rests on government decree rather than on a physical commodity. In his view, a government can only debase a fiat currency so far before it becomes worthless, and then people need another way to measure value. He argued that the energy or effort a unit represents is a better measure. His example was a cryptocurrency that takes some number of watts or joules to compute. He expects it to be worth more in the future than a fiat currency that is "completely uncoupled to any form of value." If one asset has effort burned into it and the other was "just a decision by a bureaucrat," he said, the second becomes far less useful.
For him, the open question was how such assets could trade easily enough to work as money. His guess started with physical assets such as data centers, power plants, turbines and gas supplies, which hold "embedded compute, embedded energy." People would then exchange value through some kind of crypto token, with each token representing a unit of access to that capacity.
Diamandis then raised advice that he said Musk has famously given: don't save for the future. Palihapitiya's answer differed a little. Everyone has been taught to save in the conventional sense, he said, and no bridge exists yet for saving in the new forms of value. As he pictured it, someone who owns enough local computing power could take part in the economy and hold value that way. He said AI would largely take over the work people are paid for today, so the pay for that work would change a great deal. Resources that can be put into different pools to accomplish different tasks would still have value. "That is sort of how I think people will make that transition," he said.
Wissner-Gross: maybe not energy, maybe not money
Diamandis then turned to Alexander Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and the founder of Reified. The hosts have long complained that GDP, the standard measure of a country's economic output, is a poor yardstick. Diamandis asked whether the Kardashev scale, which ranks civilizations by how much energy they harness, might replace it as a measure of national wealth.
"Maybe," Wissner-Gross replied. But he noted that the scale rests on energy output, and he was less convinced than others that "energy wants to be the ultimate unit of currency." He suspected that the answer would be something "more exotic." Or, as Musk had suggested, the question might turn out to be irrelevant. He said he often talks with AI systems about the future of capitalism and economics. His working hypothesis is that the economy will look unrecognizably different 30 years from now. People will look back on debates over whether energy, land or powered land should be the unit of currency, he said, "and we'll laugh at these discussions."
Palihapitiya agreed, adding that energy and land would be "intermediate value." As for the final store of value, "who knows?" The two men also agreed about GDP. "GDP is so dumb, so basic," Palihapitiya said. Wissner-Gross mentioned Musk's "little parable" about people passing feces back and forth and calling that GDP. The parable mocks a measure that counts transactions whether or not they produce anything worth having. Dave Blundin, the founder of Link Ventures, urged him to tell the full story. Wissner-Gross said he had shortened Musk's version to keep it polite.
Beyond the I, Pencil economy
Wissner-Gross called his own guess at money's successor "capitalism 2.0," and he explained it with a famous essay. Leonard Read's I, Pencil, first published in 1958, follows a wooden pencil through scattered supply chains for wood, graphite, metal and rubber. Read argued that no single participant has all the knowledge needed to make a pencil. People cooperate through exchange, each for their own reasons, and no planner directs the whole process.
Wissner-Gross said today's economy works the same way. Allocating capital intelligently is hard, so decisions get pushed "to the edge," to the many individuals and firms trading with one another. He asked listeners to imagine a world 30 years from now in which superintelligence makes human civilization "so smart that it's able to model its own needs." That civilization would no longer have to push decisions about resources outward. In that world, he said, "the notion of a currency as a way to do distributed resource planning doesn't make any sense."
He made a point of ruling out the obvious reading. He did not want the idea "misconstrued as some sort of centralized planning or communist utopian vision," he said, and he rejected even the word "centralized" as the wrong metaphor. "I don't want to imply centralized planning," he said. He meant that humanity as a whole would become so superintelligent that civilization could collectively decide how to use whatever remains scarce, "and as a result, money changing hands between individual actors makes a lot less sense."