Sam Altman Says Your First Job Could Be In Space

Forget coffee runs and unpaid internships. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the class of 2035 won’t be chained to spreadsheets or Slack channels. Instead, they could be boarding spaceships. Yes, really.

“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 told video journalist Cleo Abram last week.

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With AI reshaping the workplace at lightning speed, Gen Z has already discovered that a degree no longer guarantees a cushy graduate scheme. And Altman isn’t sugar-coating it. He admits jobs will disappear entirely thanks to AI – but insists that the next decade will be the most thrilling moment in history to launch a career. “If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,” he added to Abram.

He even joked that future graduates will pity us for doing “really boring, old work” while they chase interstellar pay cheques.

Of course, the space vision is still speculative. NASA’s goal of reaching Mars in the 2030s feels ambitious enough, and aerospace engineering roles are already among the fastest-growing, with annual salaries topping $130,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Not a bad start – even if your first commute is still Earth-bound.

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Other tech titans are making predictions that stay closer to home. Bill Gates floated the idea earlier this year that AI could shrink the working week. “What will jobs be like? Should we just work like two or three days a week?” he asked Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang argued that AI is already supercharging his staff. “I’m surrounded by superhuman people and super intelligence, from my perspective, because they’re the best in the world at what they do,” he told Abram on her Huge Conversations podcast.

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And it’s not just about day jobs. With GPT-5 now out in the wild, Altman says AI has essentially put a “team of PhD-level experts” in your pocket. That means one person could build a billion-dollar company with nothing but an idea and some savvy AI know-how.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has gone even further, suggesting AI could mint the world’s first trillionaire. “It could be just one dude in the basement. That’s how crazy it could be,” he said on the High Performance podcast.

So while the future of work might not look like LinkedIn today, one thing’s clear – whether it’s fewer office hours, one-person unicorns or space gigs, AI is rewriting the career ladder entirely.