Elon Musk Deconstructs Money, Prompting Bitcoiners to Ponder the Meaning

Bitcoin Economics Elon Musk

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Sead Fadilpašić

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Sead Fadilpašić

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Sead specializes in writing factual and informative articles to help the public navigate the ever-changing world of crypto. He has extensive experience in the blockchain industry, where he has served...

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June 25, 2023

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Tesla chief Elon Musk made another comment on the definition of money, with some interpreting it as supportive of Bitcoin (BTC) and others not as much.

In a Twitter exchange, Musk agreed with American author Ben Mezrich who said that he wouldn’t turn down getting paid in BTC again. Then, with Parallax Digital CEO Robert Breedlove stating that money is a tool for moving value across spacetime, with only BTC being able to move it across these dimensions, Musk argued that currencies should be observed from an information theory standpoint, with the winner being the currency with least error and latency.

Information theory is the scientific study of quantification, storage, and communication of information, traced back to a 1948 paper by Claude Shannon, who is often called ‘the father of the Digital Age.’ The continual interest in the theory and subsequent research resulted in numerous contemporary technologies.

Breedlove would further comment that Musk is “starting to see” that bitcoin is “an indisputable database which is why it is becoming the undisputed champion of money.”

Others, however, read Musk’s take on money somewhat differently.

This Musk’s latest deconstruction of money, so to say, follows a recent interview in which he had discussed raising USD 5bn, just stating: “What is money? Money is an entry in a database.” Some took this statement as Musk suggesting that money is bitcoin.

This is far from the first time Musk commented on the world’s number one crypto – he posted quite a few BTC-related tweets just recently. But it doesn’t mean it’s a recent thing for the Tesla chief. In February 2019, for example, he argued that “the Bitcoin structure is quite brilliant,” that crypto is a far better way to transfer value, and that “paper money is going away.”

Meanwhile, per the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) poll asking if digital currencies are real money, on Friday morning, 80.3% of correspondents replied ‘yes,’ and 19.7% said ‘no’. Never underestimate the power of Crypto Twitter.

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