Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has announced recently that the electric car maker will not be getting involved with cryptocurrency.
Musk admits that bitcoin is interesting but that it is not in Tesla’s plans.
“Bitcoin’s structure is brilliant but I don’t think it would be a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto,” Elon Musk told ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood in a podcast.
It was last October that Musk had tweeted about the digital currency and wrote, “Wanna buy some Bitcoin? ?? pic.twitter.com/9ZbBJ5fuVq”
While Musk says it was a joke, many had speculated that there could have been more to the tweet.
“Bitcoin’s structure is brilliant, but I don’t think it would be a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto,” Musk told Cathie Wood of ARK Invest.
Mark also told Wood that his comment from last October was tongue in cheek, and said his account got temporarily suspended because “there’s some automatic rule about selling bitcoin.”
“I was just joking”
Bitcoin had a sensational year in 2017, soaring to almost $20,000 by the end of the year, but has dropped in price over 80% since then.
According to Musk, bitcoin has the ability to bypass currency controls and replace paper versions, but it has flaws that include the energy involved with “mining.”
“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,” Musk explained. “It’s very energy intensive to create bitcoin at this point.”
Musk also said on the podcast that his company’s cars should have all the features needed to pick up passengers and drive them autonomously by the end of the year.
“I think we will be feature complete — full self-driving — this year,” Musk said. “Meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention, this year. I would say I am of certain of that. That is not a question mark.”
“However,” he added, “people sometimes will extrapolate that to mean now it works with 100 percent certainty, requires no observation, perfectly. This is not the case.”
