Musk Advocates Age Limits for Politicians, Opposes Immortality

Elon Musk's latest comments highlight his stance against immortality and advocate for age caps in public office, emphasizing the need for leadership renewal, The Wall Street Journal reported .

Elon Musk, the outspoken billionaire, has diverged from other tech leaders in his views on longevity, expressing a clear opposition to living forever. "If we live for too long, I think it ossifies society — there's no changing of the leadership because leadership never dies," Musk stated during a recent conference in France.

He argued that perpetuating existing leadership stifles new ideas, saying, "For a lot of people, they just don't change their minds; they just die — that inhibits the new ideas."

Musk's perspective on aging and leadership is not new. Over the years, he has consistently suggested age restrictions for public officeholders. His recent post on X highlights his concerns about aging: "Our brains shrinks over time as we age and when you see the brain of someone with severe dementia, the damage is not subtle. What is surprising is that it functions at all."

These remarks come amid increasing scrutiny of President Joe Biden's capabilities at age 81. The issue of age in leadership is also underscored by private emails between billionaire investor Peter Thiel and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, made public through litigation in Tennessee. Thiel, addressing the stagnation of generational power transfer, wrote, "In a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X)."

Zuckerberg, aged 40, predicted a generational shift with a millennial-aged president by 2032. He noted, "Many important institutions in our society ... are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves."

Age is a prominent concern as Biden, 81, faces increasing pressure to step aside due to questions about his mental sharpness.

Although he hasn't explicitly commented on the latest concerns about Biden's age, Musk has been a prominent advocate for implementing an age cap for public office holders.

"70 is currently the age when you receive maximum social security benefits," Musk posted in 2022. "In other words, that's when the govt concludes that you can't hold a job!!"

This advocacy extends beyond partisanship. Musk has also criticized former President Donald Trump's age, though the two have reconciled and united in their opposition to Biden.

Drawing from his knowledge of history, Musk noted the younger ages of the Founding Fathers, who were mostly in their 20s and 30s. "Didn't occur to founders of USA that people would live so long, so they put in age minimums (for wisdom), but not age maximums," he posted on X, highlighting last year in a post George Washington's relatively young age of 44.

Musk's stance on age and leadership underscores his belief in the importance of cognitive ability for those in critical positions. "If 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."