Beyond Money: Who Owns Abundance?

The idea is radical and seductive at once:

Artificial intelligence and humanoid robots will one day be able to produce nearly all goods and services. Work becomes optional. Productivity becomes practically unlimited. Scarcity disappears. And with it, money loses its meaning.

Elon Musk is only one of the more prominent proponents of this idea. His statements are less interesting as a concrete economic forecast than as the starting point for a more fundamental question:

What would actually have to happen for money to stop mattering?

The instinctive reaction is usually: unrealistic. Money will always exist.

That answer is too short.

Money is not a law of nature. It is a technology. A social operating system for coordinating scarcity, ownership, time and trust.

When those factors change, the function of money can change as well.

The decisive question is not whether money disappears. The decisive question is: which structure assumes its function, and who controls that structure?

I. Money Is Not the System. Money Is the Interface.

We often speak about money as though it were the actual source of economic power.

Yet money is first of all an abstract unit of account. It translates different goods, services, risks and points in time into a common language.

A euro does not say what a thing is.

It says what claim someone holds on that thing within a system.

Money essentially coordinates four functions:

If AI and robotics dramatically reduce the production costs of many goods, money can indeed lose relevance in certain domains.

Information is the best contemporary example.

An additional copy of a piece of software, a text or a video costs almost nothing. Marginal costs move toward zero. And yet digital goods are not automatically freely available.

Access remains controlled: through subscriptions, platforms, licences, accounts, compute capacity or regulatory restrictions.

Scarcity does not fully disappear here.

It moves.

What is scarce is no longer the copy, but access to the infrastructure that produces, distributes or verifies it.

That same principle should hold in a highly automated economy.

AI and robotics can reduce scarcity. They do not automatically abolish ownership, power or control.

II. The Hidden Incentive Architecture of Abundance

Every economic order has a visible surface and an invisible incentive architecture.

On the surface we see products, prices, companies and incomes.

Beneath them lie the actual control mechanisms:

An AI-based abundance economy would be no exception.

Even if robots could produce almost everything, those robots would first have to be built. They require energy, semiconductors, raw materials, maintenance, software, data, spare parts, factories and networks.

Behind every seemingly autonomous system stands a capital stock.

And behind every capital stock stands an ownership structure.

The central variable of the future economy may therefore no longer be labour, but ownership of automated productive capacity.

In the industrial economy, value creation was controlled by whoever owned factories, machines and distribution channels.

In the agentic economy it is controlled by whoever commands the following assets:

The notion of a world without money frequently overlooks the fact that these assets do not disappear.

On the contrary: the more production is automated, the more important control over them may become.

III. The CFO Test: Who Finances the World After Money?

Visions become robust the moment you set a cash flow statement against them.

Take seriously the assumption that humanoid robots take over large parts of human labour.

From a CFO perspective, concrete questions follow immediately.

Who finances the build-out?

Before a robot becomes productive, substantial investment is required:

These outlays have to be financed up front.

Even a future abundance economy therefore begins with a phase of massive capital requirements.

Who bears depreciation?

Productive assets do not last indefinitely.

Robots wear out. Chips become obsolete. Data centres must be modernised. Models need new training data. Energy infrastructure must be renewed.

Even if operational production runs largely autonomously, the capital stock still requires depreciation and reinvestment.

A system without prices would therefore have to give an alternative answer to a classic investment question:

Which assets are replaced, when, and who decides?

Who carries the risk?

Not every investment succeeds.

Technologies can fail. Demand can be misjudged. Resources can become scarce. Political conditions can change.

Capitalism solves this problem through decentralised decisions and the possibility of profit and loss.

That system is by no means perfect. But it produces a mechanism through which bad decisions become visible and capital allocation is corrected.

Anyone who wants to abolish money must therefore explain not only how goods are distributed.

They must explain how risk is priced and misallocation is penalised.

What replaces the price signal?

Prices are not merely revenue for companies.

They are information signals.

A rising price indicates that demand and available capacity are diverging. A falling price can point to oversupply, technological progress or declining preferences.

If money loses relevance, another information architecture must take over that function.

Future systems may be coordinated not primarily through prices, but through real-time data, forecasting models and agentic allocation systems.

But then power does not disappear.

It migrates from the market into the algorithm.

IV. Four Realistic Models of an Automated Future

Technological development does not automatically produce a particular social order.

The same robotics, the same AI and the same productivity can bring forth very different systems.

Model 1: Automated Capitalism

In this model, ownership and market structures largely remain intact.

Companies own the AI, the robots and the infrastructure. People continue to buy goods and services. Many prices fall because production costs decline.

Work, however, does not vanish entirely. It shifts into areas such as:

Money persists, but loses significance for standardised goods.

Inequality could increase in this model, because owners of automated assets capture an ever larger share of value creation.

Model 2: The Transfer State

Here, too, automated production is concentrated in a small number of companies.

But since fewer and fewer people earn classic labour income, the state redistributes part of that productivity through a universal income.

People are materially provided for, yet hold only limited productive assets.

This model can function stably. It nevertheless contains a problematic incentive structure:

The population becomes increasingly dependent on transfers, while economic control remains with companies and state institutions.

The decisive question of freedom is then no longer:

"Do I have enough income?"

But:

Do I hold my own enforceable claim on value creation, or do I receive an allocation that can be altered at any time?

Model 3: Digital Feudalism

In this scenario, not only the means of production but also central points of access are controlled.

A few platforms administer:

People gain access to nearly free services, but retain almost no independent economic or technical infrastructure.

Outwardly the system can appear comfortable.

It need not look like a classic dictatorship.

Its power arises through dependency.

Whoever is excluded from the system loses more than an account. They may lose the ability to participate in economic and social life.

In such an order money would indeed matter less.

But not because freedom had been achieved.

Rather because money had been replaced by access rights.

Model 4: Democratized Abundance

A different architecture is possible.

Productive AI and robotics systems could be owned partly collectively, publicly or in a widely distributed manner.

Citizens could receive not only transfers, but direct ownership or usage rights in automated value creation.

Conceivable instruments include:

In this model, the individual is not a passive recipient of state or corporate generosity.

They are a shareholder in technological progress.

That would be a decisive difference.

V. Abundance Is Not a Question of Production, but of Claims

A society can be extremely productive and extremely unequal at the same time.

It can generate enough food, energy, housing and digital services and still exclude people from access.

The reason is that economic systems do not only produce goods.

They produce claims.

Ownership is an institutionalised claim.

Money is a transferable claim.

A share is a claim on future cash flows.

An employment contract is a claim on income.

A civil right is a claim against the state.

The real question of the post-monetary economy is therefore:

Which claims does a person hold simply by virtue of existing, and which must they continue to acquire?

As long as desirable goods remain scarce, some form of allocation will exist.

Land in attractive locations remains scarce. Personal attention remains scarce. Political power remains scarce. Rare raw materials remain scarce. Singular experiences remain scarce.

Perhaps money will not disappear entirely.

Perhaps the economy will instead split into two layers.

On the first layer there is a nearly costless basic abundance:

On the second layer, status, uniqueness, space, influence and exceptional experiences remain scarce.

Money could lose relevance on the first layer and become all the more relevant on the second.

Technological progress would therefore not mean the end of economics.

It would reorder its scarcities.

VI. The Real Danger Is Not Surveillance, but Missing Exit Options

Surveillance is frequently described as the primary risk of digital systems.

Yet surveillance alone is not the deepest layer of power.

The decisive question is whether a person can leave the system.

A company may hold a great deal of data about its customers. As long as those customers can realistically switch to a competitor, its power remains bounded.

It becomes problematic when all essential areas of life converge in the same infrastructure:

Power then no longer arises from observation alone.

It arises from the option of exclusion.

A free system of the future therefore requires more than data protection.

It requires structural exit rights:

In a digital economy, freedom does not mean going unobserved.

Freedom means not being wholly dependent on a single institution.

VII. Agentic Execution: The Individual as Owner of Productive Systems

The greatest economic change of the coming years may be that individuals, for the first time, own scalable digital means of production.

A good AI agent is more than a tool.

It can research, analyse, code, communicate, organise, sell, optimise and prepare decisions.

Software thereby approaches a property that was previously reserved largely for organisations:

the ability to generate value continuously.

The central strategic question for individuals and companies is therefore not only:

How do I use AI?

But:

Which productive systems do I own myself?

Anyone who merely consumes other people's AI products may raise their efficiency.

Anyone who builds their own data, processes, brands, models, customer relationships and agentic workflows builds assets.

The difference is fundamental.

Efficiency improves current output.

Ownership creates future claims.

A realistic strategy for the agentic economy therefore has three layers:

1. Automate personal productivity

Recurring analytical, communicative and administrative processes are handed to agents.

Time is not merely saved, but reinvested into higher-order decisions.

2. Build proprietary systems

Know-how is translated into repeatable processes, data structures, models and automated workflows.

Individual performance becomes a scalable asset.

3. Preserve economic optionality

People and companies must avoid becoming wholly dependent on individual platforms.

Data, customer relationships, identities and core processes should remain as portable as possible.

The most important form of wealth in an automated economy may no longer be money alone.

It may be the ability to coordinate value creation independently.

VIII. After Money, Freedom Does Not Follow Automatically

The thesis of the end of money is neither pure utopia nor obvious nonsense.

It describes a real possibility:

If AI and robotics drastically reduce the marginal costs of many goods, money can lose relevance in parts of the economy.

But no particular social order follows from that.

Technology determines what is possible. Incentive structures determine what actually happens.

The same productivity can produce a world in which a few owners control nearly all productive systems.

Or a world in which every person holds a direct share in that productivity.

It can produce a generous transfer state.

Or a decentralised economy of personal agents.

It can expand freedom.

Or perfect dependency.

The most important question is therefore not:

Will we still need money in the future?

The more important question is:

Will people hold their own transferable and enforceable claims on automated value creation?

Money may disappear. Power does not. It merely changes its form.

Money can disappear.

Cash flows can disappear.

Labour income can disappear.

But power does not disappear.

It merely changes its form.

And perhaps the decisive task of our generation is not to produce abundance.

It is to shape the ownership and incentive architecture of that abundance before it hardens without us.