Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the United States is in a debt crisis, one that can only be rectified through artificial intelligence and robotics — two industries in which Musk is deeply invested — according to Business Insider.
Musk sat down with entrepreneur and podcaster Nikhil Kamath for a two-hour conversation, shared Sunday on YouTube. Among 34 chaptered topics, Musk and Kamath discussed the intersection of AI, debt, and productivity as well as whether currency will become obsolete.
Musk spoke about "robots" manufacturing goods, interspersing his commentary with his view that the U.S. was bogged down by the cost of debt.
Real-time data from Treasury.gov placed the U.S. national debt at $38.4 trillion as of December, and it increased at a shockingly fast clip throughout 2025.
"That's pretty much the only thing that's going to solve for the U.S. debt crisis. It probably would cause significant deflation," Musk said.
If those claims sounded familiar, it might be because he said nearly the exact same thing to podcaster Joe Rogan just weeks prior. In that setting, Musk warned that the U.S. would "go bankrupt," but there's no "national bankruptcy" mechanism.
Investment firm J.P. Morgan addressed the prospect of an American "debt crisis" in September, maintaining that the risk of "government insolvency" was minimal. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal expressed similarly reserved skepticism.
As for Musk's confident reiteration that only "AI and robotics" could avert imminent doom, his commentary lacked substance. He described "robots" being used to manufacture goods, but industrial robots have been in widespread use since the 1960s.
Although AI has dominated tech in recent years, it's still in its infancy, and its growing pains have roiled the economy and the environment. In addition to AI demand causing energy bills to spike, data centers have become a point of contention.
While AI firms are hesitant to disclose details about their usage of resources like water and energy or their harmful carbon pollution, people who live near data centers have raised credible quality-of-life concerns, and communities have started to oppose their construction.
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Absolutely 📈 AI has the potential to be a positive technological force, but more recently, concerns about an "AI bubble" have been rife.
The World Economic Forum warned Friday that overinvestment could rock the global economy, noting that investors were drawing back.
In a Monday profile, Fast Company cited a study that found that "95% of enterprise pilot programs involving [AI] hadn't shown a return on investment." On Reddit, users were uniformly skeptical that Musk's prediction would come to pass.
"Right after the Tesla roadster is delivered," one quipped.
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