Elon Musk has spent his career trying to outrun limits. Rockets that land themselves. Electric cars that rewrite the auto industry. Brain chips that blur the line between humans and machines. But when the conversation turns to living longer, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO hits the brakes hard.
On a 2022 "Full Send" podcast, Musk made it clear that extending human lifespan is not a goal he finds appealing. Not because it is impossible, but because he believes it would quietly break society.
The topic surfaced during a wide-ranging discussion that touched on risk, online behavior, and whether Musk worries about pushing things too far. That opened the door to a bigger question: if humanity could dramatically extend life, should it?
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Musk did not hesitate.
"I think I could probably solve longevity to some degree, but I don't want to," he said.
His reasoning was not about technology limits or cost. It was about who benefits first and what happens when power stops changing hands.
"I don't know if we should have longevity because the people who will get the longevity capability first are probably people you wouldn't want to live that long," Musk said.
He warned that extending life would almost certainly favor those already in control, locking them into influence for decades longer than intended. That, in his view, would stall progress rather than accelerate it.
"I think a lot of people in power who you wouldn't want them to have some super longevity situation because then they'd never be out of power," he said.
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From there, Musk zoomed out to what he sees as a basic truth about how societies evolve. People do not usually abandon deeply held beliefs late in life. Change happens when new generations arrive with new ideas.
"When people get old, they don't change their minds, they just die," Musk said. "So if you want to have progress in society, you got to make sure that people need to die because they don't change their mind."
It was one of the bluntest moments of the episode, and Musk did not soften it. He argued that extreme longevity would create a world that moves slower, thinks narrower, and resists adaptation.
"If all people just live for a long super long time, I think society would get very stale," he said. "Very ossified."
To Musk, death is not a moral failure of science. It is a pressure valve. A reset button that allows outdated thinking to clear out so new ideas can take root. Remove that mechanism, and systems begin to freeze.
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His argument was not anti health. Musk made a distinction between staying healthy and living indefinitely. He supports extending healthspan, remaining functional and sharp for as long as possible. What he rejects is the idea of stretching life far beyond its natural arc simply because technology allows it.
The concern runs deeper than biology. It is cultural. Political. Structural. Musk sees long life at the top as a recipe for stagnation, where leaders, institutions, and norms become increasingly disconnected from the people and realities beneath them.
In a world racing to add years, Musk's position stands out because it runs in the opposite direction. Progress, he suggests, depends less on defeating death and more on accepting its role.
To him, mortality is not the enemy of civilization. It is the mechanism that keeps it moving.
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