Tech billionaires are split into two camps on what artificial intelligence means for humanity's future: some warn it could wipe out all jobs and spell the end of civilization as we know it, while others believe it could usher in a utopian world. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, stands firmly in the latter group.

“I don't see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now,” Bezos said on stage at Italian Tech Week 2025, adding that there is much to look forward to as technology advances.

Among the changes he envisions is the end of one of modern life's most universal annoyances: the commute to work. By 2045, Bezos predicts, robots will handle that journey on our behalf. In his vision, humans won't simply be commuting to offices—they will be venturing to other planets.

“In the next kind of couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space,” he said. “That's how fast this is going to accelerate.”

“They'll mostly be living there because they want to,” he added. “We don't need people to live in space.”

When work does need to be done off-world, Bezos expects machines to take the lead. “If you need to do some work on the surface of the moon or anywhere else, we will be able to send robots to do that work, and that will be much more cost-effective than sending humans,” he said.

The Amazon founder also bristled at the doom-and-gloom rhetoric that has circulated since ChatGPT's frenzied launch. “Civilizational abundance comes from our inventions,” he insisted.

“So 10,000 years ago, whenever it was, somebody invented the plough, and we all got richer…. I'm talking about all of civilization, these tools increase our abundance, and that pattern will continue,” he said.

Altman and Musk see space living arriving soon, too

Bezos is not alone in predicting that people could one day apply for jobs—and mortgages—on another planet. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have floated similarly near-term timelines.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said that within 10 years, college graduates will be working “some completely new, exciting, super well-paid” job in space. The ChatGPT creator has even said he is jealous of young people, because his own generation's early-career jobs will look “boring” and “old” by comparison.

Musk, Tesla's CEO and the world's richest person, has been one of the most influential leaders pushing for 21st-century space accessibility. He is the cofounder and CEO of SpaceX, valued at $1.95 trillion, which has worked hand in hand with NASA to advance space exploration. Musk believes humans could set foot on Mars as soon as 2028, with unmanned SpaceX rockets commencing lift-off next year. Those liftoffs, if they hold to schedule, would serve as the nearest checkpoint for his Mars timeline.

More recently, Dylan Taylor, founder and CEO of Voyager Technologies, told Fortune that living and working in space is not merely a far-fetched notion—and he offered a timeline of his own.

“Humans will definitely be living and working in space,” the billionaire space executive said in an exclusive interview with Fortune. “That'll happen in the 2030s—probably early 2030s.” That puts his horizon well ahead of Bezos's 2045 mark.

Taylor speaks from deep involvement in the sector: he is an angel investor in Space Adventures and an early investor in Relativity Space alongside Mark Cuban. In 2017, he founded his first space venture, Space for Humanity, and two years later he founded Voyager. That bet paid off last year, when the company went public on the NYSE at a $3.8 billion valuation, making Taylor a billionaire at 53. Voyager is now building the replacement for the International Space Station and holds multiple NASA contracts—a sign of how much of today's space push runs through commercial companies working alongside the agency.

“We'll have a moon base, people living and working on the moon,” he added. “You'll be able to look up at the moon and see lights on the moon.”

Gates: plenty to do on Earth—and maybe a two-day workweek

Not everyone in the tech world is looking skyward. Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, has suggested that billionaires and world leaders would be better off focusing their efforts on the planet we currently call home. “Space? We have a lot to do here on Earth,” he said previously in an interview with comedian James Corden.

Gates has been on the fence about how far technology should be pushed, once saying that if he could ask a time traveler anything, he would want to know whether AI eventually doomed or helped humanity.

On the optimistic side, Gates predicts AI could open up a new era for workers, in which a two-day workweek becomes the norm, machines handle the hard work, and people have more time for the things they love. Even he sees the upside in that: “If you zoom out, the purpose of life is not just to do jobs,” he has said. For Gates, in other words, the technology-driven future arrives not by leaving Earth but by reclaiming time on it.

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on October 15, 2025.