Elon Musk Believes People Should Not Live Longer, Says US Has 'Very Ancient Leadership'
20:39 GMT 27.03.2022 (Updated: 20:13 GMT 19.10.2022)
© AP Photo / Matt RourkeCEO Elon Musk departs from the justice center in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Testifying for a second day, Musk pushed back again Tuesday against a lawsuit that blames him for engineering Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of a financially precarious company called SolarCity that was marred by conflicts of interest and never generated the profits Musk insisted it would.
© AP Photo / Matt Rourke
Subscribe
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently gave an interview in which he discussed a number of topics, including the situation in Ukraine, the Russian president, space travel, his Starlink project and how he sometimes feels “lonely.” He also expressed concern about national leaders who, according to him, are detached from their citizens.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk said that society should not “try to have people live for a really long time.” Commenting on how the human lifespan has increased significantly in our time, he noted that this will cause an “asphyxiation of society“ as “most people don't change their mind.”
“They just die. So, if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance,” he said in an interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Insider’s Axel Springer. “So, if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance.”
Musk claimed that a “gerontocracy,” when the government is largely composed of citizens significantly older than the general population, is not healthy. He posed that the US, in particular, has “very, very ancient leadership” and wondered how leading figures can “stay in touch with the people” if they are separated from most of the population by several generations.
According to him, the founders of the country set a minimum age for political leaders, but they did not think of a maximum threshold because they didn't expect people to live that long. Musk said that leaders must be intelligently connected to the majority of country’s population for a democracy to function.
“If you're too young or too old, you can't say that you will be attached,” Musk said, adding that he'd like to see political leaders “be ideally within 10 or at least, 20 years of the average age of the population.”
Last year, Musk noted that people who hold “very important positions” and make decisions regarding the security of the country should have "sufficient presence of mind and cognitive abilities.” He also proposed banning people over 70 from running for political office.