Musk has long been skeptical of fiat currency.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, recently took to Twitter to once again criticize fiat currencies, calling them a complete “scam.” Responding to a tweet asking about normalized scams, Musk simply replied “fiat currencies” to express his view that government-backed currencies have become unreliable.
This isn’t the first time Musk has expressed skepticism about fiat currencies. In a 2021 tweet, he said “The real battle is between Fiat & Crypto. On balance, I’m for the latter.” At a Bitcoin-themed conference that year, Musk also described himself as a “supporter of the idea of Bitcoin & crypto in general.”
Musk’s own social media platform X (formerly Twitter) plans to initially support transfers between users in fiat currencies, and then may expand to cryptocurrency trading, according to the Financial Times.
Unlike fiat currencies, Bitcoin has a limited supply of 21 million coins and is decentralized, with its creation controlled by an algorithm rather than by any central authority. Supporters argue that this protects people from excessive government intervention and inflationary policies.
In contrast, central banks can print unlimited amounts of fiat money and gradually devalue it over time. Uncontrolled money printing can lead to hyperinflation, such as Zimbabwe, which saw inflation hit 79 billion% in 2008 after years of increasing fiat supply, or the Turkish lira, which posted an annual inflation rate of 61.5% yesterday.
For cryptocurrency supporters, the ability of governments to seize fiat assets, as Cyprus did to bank deposit holders in 2013, is another risk that does not exist with Bitcoin.
