Elon Musk on ‘The Role for Crypto in the Future’

Last weekend, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who recently bought micro blogging platform Twitter, talked about the role crypto can play in a future version of Twitter and its role in the future in general.

On 3 December 2022, during a Twitter Space hosted by Mario Nawfal, the Founder and CEO of IBC Group, Musk was asked by Bitcoin advocate Simon Dixon if there were any plans to add support for Bitcoin payments to Twitter.

Musk replied:

“I think that’s actually more powerful even than i think censorship, which is control of the monetary system. If you have control of the monetary system, and control the transactions, you can literally starve someone to death, you can throw them out of their homes.

“So, we have to be very careful about who’s controlling the money system here and what rules and regulations are they going to put on transactions. It seems like PayPal has strayed pretty far from the path of that… So that’s concerning.

“I do think there is a role for crypto in the future without speaking to any big particular crypto coin as a means of ensuring that the monetary system does not get completely corrupted. It essentially provides competition to the fiat system…“

When asked about the move to CBDCs, Musk replied:

“I don’t think they know what they’re talking about… I think they’ve been planning a few things. First of all, almost all money is digital already. The fiat monetary system — for practical purposes — consists of a series of heterogeneous mainframes running antiquated COBOL…. It’s kind of embarrassing… Whether banks create their own cryptocurrencies, i think it’s somewhere relative. People will use the cryptocurrencies that they think will accrue value over time and not use the ones that don’t.“

As for adding payments support to Twitter, he said:

“WeChat has a lot of functionality that Twitter should have. It’s kind of a no brainer for Twitter to have payments, both fiat currency and crypto, and to make that easy and simple for people to use.“