- Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes death is critical to human progress.
- Death is “important,” he said this week, because people rarely change their minds — “they just die.”
- “If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed,” he said.
When billionaire Elon Musk isn’t busy running Tesla and SpaceX as CEO, where he’s attempting to transform how we drive and turn humans into a multi-planet species (respectively), he’s not researching the secret to immortality.
“I am not aware of any secret technology to combat aging,” Musk said during an interview this week at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit.
Moreover, even if humans could live much longer, Musk said that wouldn’t be such a good thing for human society on the whole.
"It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die," he said. "If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed."
The concept that people don't change their minds, even when provided with factual evidence to the contrary, has been repeatedly confirmed in studies across the last 50 years. Therefore, Musk argued, if people were to live longer or become immortal, it could have a detrimental effect on society — where ideas stagnate and fester rather than being evolved or overtaken by succeeding generations of people.
This isn't the first time Musk has gone after aging populations' impact on everyone else: He recently argued for age limits on holding public office, and echoed those sentiments during the WSJ conference.
"I am not poking fun at aging," he said. "I am saying we've got people in very important positions that have to make decisions that are critical to the security of the country, then they need to have sufficient presence of mind and cognitive ability to make those decisions well. Because the whole country is depending on them."
The current US president, for instance, is 79 years old and was born during World War II. The last US president left office at age 74.
In Musk's opinion, neither man would've been able to hold office as they're both over the age of 70.
You can watch the full interview with Elon Musk at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit here: