Will Language Learning Become Obsolete? Elon Musk Thinks So

Elon Musk's Neuralink might make language obsolete.

Photo by JD Lasica on Flickr

Did you know top business leaders such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk, never bothered becoming fluent in a foreign language?

Language courses usually tell us that a second language would give us new job and career opportunities and improve and sharpen our minds. Yet, no one would question the wisdom and success of these entrepreneurs. So before you invest plenty of your valuable time learning a foreign language on Duolingo, let’s analyze whether it’s worth learning a foreign language today and in the near future.

Do business leaders learn a foreign language?

English is the most used and spoken language worldwide, so probably this is the main reason some tech leaders consider that it’s enough to speak English. Apple CEO Tim Cook even thinks that learning to code is more important than English as a second language. In 2017, when he was in France, he said,

If I were a French student and I were 10 years old, I think it would be more important for me to learn coding than English. I’m not telling people not to learn English in some form — but I think you understand what I am saying is that this is a language that you can [use to] express yourself to 7 billion people in the world.

Steve Jobs shared the same idea. In an interview, he said that everybody should learn to program a computer because it teaches you how to think. You can argue that this is expected from people in the tech industry, but this idea makes me keep thinking about the relevance of learning languages other than English in the future.

Bill Gates seems to give more importance to learning a foreign language. In 2015, he admitted that he feels pretty stupid because he doesn’t know any foreign languages, but I feel that he doesn’t consider it worth learning to speak a foreign language  anyway.

On the other hand, some business leaders speak a second language, but only a few are native English speakers.

Global business leaders such as Leo Apotheker (former CEO at SAP, Hewlett Packard), Paul Bulcke (CEO, Nestle), and Tidjane Thiam (Chief Executive, Credit Suisse) are able to speak more than 2 languages. Their foreign language skills help them manage giant companies with such an international scope. That being said, English isn’t the native language of most multilingual CEOs.

In fact, a few of them are native English speakers— Mark Zukerberg (English and Chinese) and Michael Bloomberg (English and Spanish) are some examples. If we consider the Fortune 500 CEOs, only 9 of them can speak more than one language.

Elon Musk's Neuralink and the future of language