Elon Musk: Bitcoin Is "Brilliant" And "Paper Money Is Going Away"

"Seriously?"

Elon Musk is talking cryptocurrency. The real Elon Musk, not one of those Twitter scammers.

On Tuesday, Tesla's CEO sat down for a podcast interview with ARK Invest, a tech investment firm. In addition to chatting about electric vehicles and self-driving cars, the interviewers decided to throw Musk an "off-topic" question about cryptocurrencies.

After an initially incredulous response — "Crypto, seriously?" — Musk went on to elaborate on his thoughts about crypto and Bitcoin in particular — and while he sees the value in both, don't expect Tesla to get involved in the space any time soon.

Pros and Cons

During the interview, Musk admitted that he thinks "the Bitcoin structure is quite brilliant" and that there might be "some merit to Ethereum as well and maybe some others."

He went on to discuss the uses of the cryptocurrency with ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood, who noted that "there were $1.3 trillion worth of transactions in bitcoin, and we don't see it here because it's not for pizza or Coke."

"It might be for coke," Musk deadpanned, in an apparent drug joke, prompting laughs from his interviewers.

"We figure it's business-to-business in Africa where it is prohibitively expensive to convert from one nation's currency to another," Wood continued. "It really is very important. It's money over IP for them. It's free transmission of money, and that's really important to opening up the world."

"It bypasses currency controls," Musk said. "Paper money is going away, and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure. That has its pros and cons."

Tesla Coin

As for whether Tesla would ever get involved in crypto, Musk doesn't see that happening any time soon.

His company's primary goal is to "accelerate the advent of sustainable energy," according to Musk, and as he noted during the interview, mining cryptocurrencies is computationally energy intensive.

"I'm not sure it would be a good use for Tesla resources to get involved in crypto," he concluded.

"Just to clarify," ARK Invest analyst Tasha Keeney asked later, "Tesla's not going to start selling bitcoin anytime soon?"

"No, we're not," Musk replied.

READ MORE: Elon Musk Calls Bitcoin ‘Brilliant,’ Better Than Paper Money for Value Transfer [CoinDesk]

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