If you are fighting poverty by supporting charities, you are doing it wrong. The real solution? Buy Elon Musk’s robots!
Really? Well, that is what Musk promised about Tesla’s Optimus robots when tweeting on X, his social media platform: “Optimus will eliminate poverty and provide universal high income for all.” Uh, sure.
Of course, selling lots of robots would secure Musk’s status as the world’s richest man – a status that has alarmed Pope Leo himself. “Ellon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world,” Pope Leo said in his first formal interview after becoming pope. “What does that mean and what’s that about? If that’s the only thing that has value anymore, we are in big trouble.”
Musk shot back on X with a “Bible bullet” from Matthew’s gospel implying that Pope Leo is just as rich as he is: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
This snarky comeback conveniently overlooked the fact that the Catholic Church’s diverse assets are not the pope’s personal wealth. He might own a popemobile (which is not a Tesla), but he does not “own” your neighborhood parish.
Musk is not the only broligarch (a slang term for tech titans) to make a papal jab on X. Billionaire venture capitalist Mark Andreesen (one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures) did so as well, sharing a mocking meme of an incredulous-looking Sydney Sweeney (known from the possibly eugenicist “good jeans” ads) in response to Pope Leo’s call for AI regulations.
But Andreesen does more than post memes. In his Techno-Optimist Manifesto he identifies as “enemies” those who, like Pope Leo and Francis, insist that tech innovation be guided by concepts like “tech ethics,” “trust and safety,” “social responsibility,” and “sustainability.” He claims we are being lied to by those who worry about tech’s impact upon jobs, wages, children, and humanities future – again, like our two recent pontiffs.
Andreesen’s Silicon Valley power has translated into political power, too. He advises President Trump, serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Council (which supports ICE), and helped select personnel for the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) which, in Musk’s words, fed “USAID into the woodchipper,” thereby threatening millions of vulnerable lives and decimating the work of Catholic Relief Services.
It is no stretch of the imagination to suppose that Pope Leo had people like Musk and Andreesen in mind when he criticized “the extremely rich people who are investing in artificial intelligence,” while “totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity.” He did not name names. He probably did not need to.
However, the unnamed broligarchs in the papal crosshairs might protest that they certainly are concerned for human beings – just not those living today. It is better, they argue, to build a utopian future for the humans of tomorrow. This conveniently involves investing in their tech toys (like poverty-busting Optimus robots). These investments, in turn, make them rich(er), and gives them more control over a world they seek to dominate.
Their philosophy – pervasive in tech circles – is known by the clunky name of “longtermerism.” Its utilitarian premise is that one helps more people through a long-term focus on an imagined world of tomorrow than through relieving real suffering today. It is summed- up nicely by billionaire Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI (co-founded by Musk):
If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the future.
With that sort of calculus, the needs of those who might have been helped by USAID in our time are insignificant compared with the trillions of people coming after us. Seeing suffering in our midst may elicit compassion and sympathy. But that is bleeding-heart foolishness to longtermerists. To them, feelings like that cloud our reason, compromise humanity’s bright future, and lead Musk to complain that, “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.”
Musk’s assessment was conveniently reinforced by his AI chatbot Grok, in which Andreeson invests. Reflecting on longtermerist principles, Grok asserted that if forced to choose between vaporizing Musk’s brain and committing mass murder, Musk should be saved since “Elon’s potential to advance humanity could save billions.” Because, of course, he has invaluable tech expertise.
Tech is the longtermerist’s answer to everything. “Give us a real-world problem,” Andreessen promises in his manifesto, “and we can invent technology that will solve it.” Accordingly, tech development should not be regulated or slowed down in any way. Instead, in the (in)famous words of Facebook founder and Meta CEO, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, it is necessary to “move fast and break things” – regardless of who or what might be broken.
Billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir CEO, Peter Theil, is Zuckerberg and Altman’s mentor, Facebook’s first outside investor, and Musk’s PayPal cofounder. He goes so far as to label those who would regulate artificial intelligence as “legionnaires of the antichrist.” He does not name Popes Leo or Francis as part of that cohort, but their inclusion is implied.
Theil has expressed concern about a “woke American pope” – a clear reference to Pope Leo. Regarding Pope Francis, he hoped that Catholic Vice President Vance would fight with him often and told Vance – whom he as mentored, employed, and funded – that Pope Francis should be ignored. In fact, Theil’s “two-word answer” for why he – who professes Christianity – is not Catholic? “Pope Francis.” The reason? Distributive economics.
Tech advancement is so paramount for longtermerists that they resist allocating resources – a government’s or an individual’s – to other purposes. Theil and Andreesen espouse absolutely free markets and Theil despises the “Giving Pledge” taken by some of the ultra-rich to distribute their wealth before they die.
Pope Leo dismisses such worldviews and roundly rejects longtermerism in Dilexi Te, his apostolic exhortation on love for the poor that was begun by Pope Francis before his death: “(T)he dignity of every person must be respected today, not tomorrow” (emphasis mine). He continues: “(T)he extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.”
Pope Leo lambastes the “dominant culture” that “would have us abandon the poor to their fate and consider them unworthy of our attention,” and laments the “selfishness and indifference” of those who “ignore the poor and live as if they do not exist.” In response, he calls Christians to a countercultural solidarity with the poor that neutralizes “the destructive effects of the empire of money” and the “dictatorship of an economy that kills.”
To cultivate empathy, Pope Leo encourages “almsgiving” that “will touch and soften our hardened hearts.” He praises “works of mercy” which “free us from the risks of living our relationships according to a logic of calculation and self-interest” – a seeming allusion to longtermerism’s utilitarian thinking. In warning of a “new tyranny,” Pope Leo denounces “economic thinking that requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything.”
Why? Because Pope Leo knows that “invisible market forces” will not eliminate poverty and neither will robots or any other tech. What does work, he says, is charity: “Charity has the power to change reality; it is a genuine force for change in history.” And that charity, he concludes, needs to be offered “with urgency.” Not for some distant utopian future, but for now.
Image: “Robot de Martillo” (CC BY 2.0) by luis perez
Scott Hurd is vice president of leadership development at Catholic Charities USA. He is author of five books, including Forgiveness: A Catholic Approach and Around the Table: Retelling the Story of the Eucharist through the Eyes of Jesus' First Followers. Scott's writing has been published in multiple journals and magazines, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He earned his theology degree from Oxford University and in 2026 will serve as a social innovation fellow with the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focusing on AI ethics.
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