Elon Musk's complex relationship with crypto

Last week, Elon Musk, Tesla's tech entrepreneur and chief executive officer, said the Bitcoin (BTC) structure was "very bright," adding that digital currency was "a much better way to transfer value. only bits of paper ".

Notably, it was perhaps the most straightforward commentary on crypto-currencies and Musk's blockchain so far, as it usually tends to avoid the subject. However, there have been few meetings between the technology mogul and the crypto – after all, given Musk's previous experience with PayPal, he could not let the innovative digital payment method go by.

Here is how his relationship with crypto has evolved since 2014, when he made his first public comments on Bitcoin.

October 2014: Elon Musk says Bitcoin will be mainly used for illegal transactions

On October 8, 2014, Walter Isaacson interviewed Musk on stage at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit. At one point, Isaacson asked Tesla's CEO that he thought Bitcoin would disrupt the fiduciary currencies, which he replied:

"I think Bitcoin is probably a good thing. I think it will be mainly a way to make illegal transactions. But it is not necessarily totally bad. You know, some things should not be illegal. "

Musk then added:

"This will be useful for legal and illegal transactions, otherwise it would have no value as a use for illegal transactions because you must have a bridge between legal and illegal."

The contractor followed his comments by revealing that he did not hold any BTC at that time.

November 2017: Musk clarifies that it is not Satoshi and declares to own "part of BTC"

On November 22, Sahil Gupta, who is a former SpaceX trainee, wrote an entry in Medium, speculating that Musk could be Satoshi Nakamoto, the original creator of Bitcoin.

Specifically, Gupta highlighted Musk's track record in economics, his experience with production software, and his history of innovation to postulate that Musk could have invented Bitcoin.

The theory was quickly refuted by Musk himself, who tweeted Gupta's suggestion "is not true". The CEO of SpaceX, however, added that he now had "part of BTC", a friend sent it a few years ago.

December 2017: Musk says that he has never heard of Bitcoin

On December 22, Neeraj K. Agrawal, an employee of the non-profit cryptographic research institution CoinCenter, asked Musk if he had created Bitcoin, to which the technology mogul responded that he "has never heard of it," linking a satirical article on The Onion titled "A Bitcoin Plunge Reveals Possible Vulnerabilities in Crazy Imaginary Internet Money."

January 2018: Musk refers to the hype to promote a flamethrower

In January 2018, when the major altcoins reached their highest level after the unprecedented rise of Bitcoin, Musk in use the resulting hype to promote a flamethrower published by its tunnel construction company, Boring:

"The flamethrower is sensitive, its password is" cryptocurrency "and it comes with a free blockchain."

February 2018: Musk comments on cryptographic scams on Twitter and reveals the share of BTC that he holds

Last February, the CEO of SpaceX had tackled a growing trend on Twitter, while crooks were introduced as famous characters such as Musk or Donald Trump and cheated users by sending cryptocurrency.

Responding to one of the tweets asking why such spam was so widespread, Musk claims that he had already contacted Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, about it.

"I literally have zero cryptocurrency, aside from 0.25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago," he also revealed, which seems to re-read the commentary mentioned above concerning its cryptographic holdings.

At the time, his BTC chips amounted to approximately $ 2,531. At the present time, this figure would be even more modest, standing at around $ 975.

Interestingly, just days before Musk's tweet, Tesla's Amazon Web Service (AWS) software container was hacked by cryptojackers. Specifically, the fraudsters accessed Tesla's AWS access information by entering a non-password protected Kubernetes software container. Then they used this container to exploit Bitcoin for an indefinite period. The attack was well-coordinated, with hackers setting up their own operating pool software, and then connecting the malicious script to an "unlisted" endpoint, while maintaining the use of their processor at a low level to avoid detection.

Before that, in December 2017, an owner of an electric car, Tesla S, declared that he was exploiting Bitcoin with his vehicle's compressor, placing an extraction platform in the trunk.

March 2018: Musk is spotted holding a book on crypto-currencies

In March, a photo of Musk holding a book entitled "Cryptocurrency simply explained" surfaced online. The photo was taken at the South by Southwest festival, where the contractor reportedly took an article from the crowd to sign. According to the author of the book, Julian Hosp, Musk kept the book.

Source: photo by Ryan Chylinski on Twitter

October 2018: Musk jokes about the sale of Bitcoin and is banned on Twitter

On Oct. 22, the CEO of Tesla provoked rumors about his company's involvement in cryptocurrencies by publishing a tweet that said, "do you want to buy Bitcoin?" The image attached to the article is taken from the website Cryptocurrency Girls, which describes the main crypto-currencies as cartoon characters.

Later, Musk confirmed that it was a gag. "I was joking," he said in a recent podcast hosted by the consulting firm ARK Invest. "The crooks Bitcoin and Ethereum were so prevalent on Twitter that I decided to participate and I said at one point that you want to buy Bitcoin?"

After the tweet, the account of the entrepreneur was briefly suspended "due to an automatic rule prohibiting the sale of Bitcoin or something like that," he explained.

November 2018: Fraudsters steal crypto worth US $ 157,000 after hacking verified Twitter accounts

On November 5, the British news agency Telegraph announced that scammers had stolen 120,000 euros (about $ 157,000), after being mistaken for Musk and having promoted one of them. fake cryptocurrency gift on Twitter.

Specifically, hackers have penetrated the Twitter accounts of clothing retailers Matalan and Pathé UK, the British branch of the French filmmaker, and have posted messages promoting this gift. As both accounts have been audited, subscribers are more likely to take their message at face value.

The message claimed that Musk was leaving Tesla and distributing free Bitcoin via a typical cryptographic scam form on Twitter: subscribers were encouraged to send a small amount of Bitcoin to a given wallet address and promised a much higher amount in return.

According to the Telegraph report, more than 300 people have been victims of the scam.

February 2019: Musk says Bitcoin structure "is pretty bright", adding that there is "some merit to Ethereum"

On February 19, ARK Invest published a podcast featuring Musk, which has clarified its point of view on cryptocurrencies and, for the first time since 2014, made serious comments on the subject. At first, however, when the interviewer asked Musk to get out of the subject and talk about crypto-currencies, he started laughing at it. "Crypto? Seriously? S & # 39; he exclaimed.

Nevertheless, in response to a question about whether Bitcoin would become the only native cryptocurrency of the Internet, Musk said:

"I think the Bitcoin structure was pretty bright. It seems that there is also a merit to Ethereum, and perhaps even to others. "

Musk then pointed out that "it would not be wise to use Tesla's resources to get involved in cryptography" because his company "is trying to accelerate the development of the technology." 39, sustainable energy ". He has thus put forward the high energy consumption of crypto. disadvantages:

"One of the disadvantages of cryptography is that, from a computational point of view, it consumes a lot of energy. So there must be some kind of constraint on creating crypto. But it takes a lot of energy to create the incremental Bitcoin at this point. "

As for the pros, Musk said he liked crypto-currencies for their ability to transfer value and bypass currency controls:

"It bypasses the controls of the currency. Paper money is disappearing and cryptography is a much more efficient way of transferring value than bits of paper. It's certain.