Elon Musk: No One Gets Free Bread Until I Have Replaced Every Worker With a Robot

Elon Musk has repeatedly promised that future Americans won’t have to work and will get paid to sit around doing nothing. The billionaire insists this will happen all thanks to his humanoid robot Optimus, which he predicts will be able to do everything from laundry to babysitting kids. Optimus will somehow deliver a perfect society where humans no longer have to work and there will be no need for money, according to Musk.

It’s funny, then, that Musk so frequently whines about people getting things from the government for free. The latest example was a quote-tweet on Monday where the Tesla CEO complained that ancient Rome distributed free bread, implying that it was one reason the Roman Empire collapsed.

Musk tweeted “ They faced the same issues in Ancient Rome ,” on Monday, quoting a long tweet from an account called Handre, described as a “free market pamphleteer.”

“Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow,” the Handre account tweeted.

“What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive,” the account insisted.

“The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn’t weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.”

Musk thought this was a genius observation, clearly applicable to modern politics.

The modern Republican complaint is that when you give people free food in the form of SNAP, it incentivizes them not to work and to simply rely on the government. Musk said similar things as the head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, last year. The wealthiest man in the world, who depends on countless government contracts, was put in charge of decimating the federal government in the name of cost savings. He oversaw the departure of about 300,000 government workers and his cuts made everyone less safe. A study published last year in the Lancet linked USAID cuts to about 4.5 million projected children’s deaths by 2030.

It’s impossible to square Musk’s repeated insistence that government shouldn’t be providing free things to regular Americans with his claims that robots will deliver a society where everyone is wealthy and doesn’t have to work. Those ideas are obviously in conflict. Why should only the people of the future get access to a strong social safety net or a utopian government? And what is it about Musk’s robots that would make that happen?

Musk has made many predictions for robots that have already failed. In Jan. 2025, Musk said the company would have produced about 10,000 robots by the end of that year .