Elon Musk was named the 2021 Person of the Year by TIME Magazine – a reward given to him for “creating solutions to an existential crisis, for embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans,” and other worthwhile achievements.
After receiving the reward, during the interview with TIME Magazine, Musk took the opportunity to talk about money. Naturally, he also spoke of cryptocurrencies and, more precisely, about Bitcoin and Dogecoin.
Before getting into the topic, Musk defended his credentials and argued that there are “very few people” that understand the nature of money better than him.
I played a significant role in creating PayPal. My understanding of the money system at a fundamental level of how it actually works, the detailed mechanic of it, is, I think that there’s very few people who understand it better than me.
He then went on to talk about Bitcoin. He argued that the transaction volume of BTC is low and that the cost per transaction is high. He admitted that “at its base level” is suitable for a store of value.
Fundamentally, Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. – Musk concluded.
He then started talking about Dogecoin and arguing that “even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transactional flow you can do with Dogecoin is […] much higher than Bitcoin.”
Musk also said that DOGE is slightly inflationary, but that said inflation is a fixed number as opposed to being a percentage. Hence it will be diminishing in time.
Not long after he made this statement, he also tweeted that Tesla will start accepting DOGE for some merchandise, catapulting its price considerably