Elon Musk claims ‘paper money is going away’ and that cryptocurrency will take its place

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed that as the world moves towards a cashless society, cryptocurrency may become more prevalent.

During an episode of the ARK Invest podcast hosted by Cathie Wood, Musk scoffed at the host for bringing up cryptocurrencies, asking: “Crypto, seriously?”

His lack of desire to discuss the digital asset class stems from a time when he was suspended on Twitter for jokingly asking if anybody wanted to buy any Bitcoin.

He said: “Bitcoin and Ethereum scammers were so rampant on Twitter I decided to join in, and I said at one point wanna buy some Bitcoin?

“Then my account got suspended cause obviously there was like some automatic rule that if you try to sell Bitcoin or something and I was just joking.”

While the 47-year-old billionaire believes Bitcoin’s structure is “brilliant,” he doesn’t see Tesla getting involved.

“Bitcoin’s structure is brilliant. It seems like there’s some merit to Ethereum as well, and maybe some of the others. But I don’t think it would be a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto,” Musk added.

“Paper money is going away and crypto is a much better value for a transfer of value than pieces of paper, but it has its pros and cons.

“I think actually one of the downsides of crypto is that computationally it’s quite energy intensive. So there have to be some kind of constraints on the creation of crypto. So it’s very energy intensive to create an incremental Bitcoin at this point.”

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