- With Gen Z facing existential career crises, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that in just 10 years, college grads will be exploring the solar system—jobs that will reel in sky-high salaries. The tech leader even says he’s envious of young people because our early-career jobs will look “boring” by comparison.
As AI reshapes the workforce, many Gen Z college graduates are finding out the hard way that their degrees don’t guarantee a smooth career launch.
Now, even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—one of Silicon Valley’s biggest leaders driving the AI revolution—is admitting the elephant in the room is true: AI will wipe out some jobs entirely. However, the tech billionaire insists the coming decade could be the most exciting time in history to start a career, especially for anyone who’s ever dreamed of working in space.
Not only will they be reeling in sky-high salaries, but Altman says they’ll also be “feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this really boring, old work and everything is just better.”
“In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job,” Altman said to video journalist Cleo Abram last week.
Though it’s unclear how widespread space exploration will expand in the coming years—considering NASA’s broad goal of getting to Mars in the 2030s—aerospace engineers are growing faster than the national average of all jobs, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And they bring home an envy-inducing annual paycheck of over $130,000.
How AI will reshape the workplace
Other tech pioneers have AI predictions that are more grounded on Earth—but still alluring to workers. For example, billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said earlier this year that the technology might dramatically reduce the length of the workweek, thanks to humans no longer being needed “for most things.”
“What will jobs be like? Should we just work like two or three days a week?” the tech billionaire told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show earlier this year.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed that AI has already given his workers “superhuman” skills—something that will only increase as the technology advances.
“I’m surrounded by superhuman people and super intelligence, from my perspective, because they’re the best in the world at what they do. And they do what they do way better than I can do it. And I’m surrounded by thousands of them. Yet it never one day caused me to think, all of a sudden, I’m no longer necessary,” he separately told Cleo Abram on her Huge Conversations podcast series.
While Altman admitted that his crystal ball remains foggy—and that the true direction of AI is unclear—he is actually envious of Gen Z professionals starting off their careers: “If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,” he added to Abram.
Fortune reached out to OpenAI for comment.
AI will make one-person, billion-dollar companies
After last week’s launch of the latest OpenAI model, GPT-5, Altman declared that the world has access to technology equivalent to a “team of PhD-level experts” right in their pocket. And as a result, the CEO said it will be easier than ever for one person to create a business that used to take “hundreds” of people—all it takes is coming up with a great idea and mastering AI tools.
“It is probably possible now to start a company, that is a one-person company that will go on to be worth more than a billion dollars, and more importantly than that, deliver an amazing product and service to the world, and that is like a crazy thing,” he said.
Billionaire Mark Cuban has gone even further with his prediction, saying that AI could give Elon Musk a run for his money as the world’s richest person.
“We haven’t seen the best or the craziest of what [AI is] going to be able to do,” Cuban told the High Performance podcast earlier this summer. “And not only do I think it’ll create a trillionaire, but it could be just one dude in the basement. That’s how crazy it could be.”
