Elon Musk is attempting to weigh-in on the Universal Basic Income (UBI) debate again, making very much the same brief comment he made last time. But he’s such a powerful, influential person, it’s worth addressing what he gets right and wrong about UBI. In one tweet on Thursday, April 16. 2026, Musk wrote:
- Universal high income via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
- AI/robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation
The sentence about inflation can be dealt with very briefly, Musk’s prediction is possible, but it’s naïve, oversimplified, wishful thinking. We cannot rely on it to resource UBI year-after-year-after-year. At some point, we will most likely have to counteract increased spending by net beneficiaries with some strategy to discourage spending by wealthier people to keep inflation in check. The best tool to do that is a well-targeted tax policy.
Musk’s “Universal High Income” (UHI) is little more than a rebranding of “Universal Basic Income” (UBI). Musk wants to sound like he favors something even more progressive than UBI, but a UHI is really just a good UBI. UBI advocates, such as Philippe Van Parijs and myself have been arguing for the highest-sustainable UBI for decades without thinking that its size requires a different name.
UBI or UHI is an unconditional cash income delivered to every citizen with no means test and no behavioral requirements. You can make money on top of it, and the money you make will likely be taxed, but you don’t lose your UBI not matter how much you make. That means that someone living solely off the UBI with no other income has the lowest income of any citizen. Right now, the lowest possible income is zero. UBI is simply the idea of a market economy where the base level of income is higher than zero.
In that sense, no matter how high the universal income is, it is a basic income. If you think of “basic” in UBI as just enough to cover basic needs, UHI and UBI are different. If you think of “basic” in UBI as a base under your private income no matter how high that base might be, the UHI is just a high level of UBI. (Some UBI advocates exclude any concept of size from the definition of UBI. Others say that UBI should be defined as at least enough to cover basic needs. Therefore, universal “high” income qualifies as UBI under any going definition I know of.)
Musk is right to say that UBI level can be much more than just enough to cover our basic needs. In fact, a recent study by Jack Rossbach (Georgetown University-Qatar) and me show that the cost of UBI just enough to eliminate official poverty has gone down from over 9% of GDP a half century ago to only 2.67% of GDP today, and for 9% of GDP, we could get a pretty high UBI. He’s right that a government check (i.e. an electronic transfer of funds) is the best way to make this economy work for everyone, but again, he’s wrong to leave out that people in the top 1, 10 or 20 percent should be willing to pay more taxes to make this economy work for everyone.
Musk is right about why a high UBI is becoming more affordable every year: it is because of the great drivers of economic growth, such as automation, computerization, and AI. He’s wrong, however, about the biggest problem associated with automation being unemployment. The problems are low wages, inequality, stagnating salaries, and employment uncertainty. These problems have been getting worse for decades without any steady overall increase in unemployment. We’ve had enormous automation and economic growth in the last half century, but unemployment is no higher than it was in the 1960s. Yet, most the benefits of all that economic growth have gone to the 1%. Most Americans have shared little if at all in the benefits of economic growth. Members of the middle class has a few more gadgets than they used to have, but they have a harder time paying rent, paying for education, and paying for medical care. They have greater job uncertainty and no high standard of living than they did a half century ago. If you’re job is outmoded, and you have to go into the bottom of the labor market, you’ll find that minimum wage workers have a lower standard of living now than they did in the 1950s when our economy produced a quarter of what it does now. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the need for UBI is here, now, and overdue—not in some, possibly far-off future where robotics replace all jobs.
I do not count on current or former members of the Trump administration to contribute more than a tweet to the movement for a better economy. I don’t count on Democratic politicians either. It will take a movement of the people, but Musk is right about this much: a high UBI is the best way to make the economy work for common people.
– Karl Widerquist, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 20, 2026
