Elon Musk is Time’s 2021 Person of the Year: his crypto talk

Yesterday, Time Magazine, named Elon Musk as its Person of the Year for 2021. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO also expressed his views on crypto, calling them interesting but doubting that they will replace fiat currencies. 

Elon Musk is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and talks about crypto

The year 2021 is drawing to a close and Time Magazine has described it as “the year of Elon Unbound”, naming the world’s richest man Elon Musk as its Person of the Year.

Amongst the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s many feats, and recounting his story from childhood, the Time Magazine interview also reports Musk’s statements on the crypto sector on two occasions.

The first refers to Musk’s move to accept Bitcoin as payment for Teslas last spring. A move that had sparked accusations of hypocrisy since the “green environmental man” had chosen a mining-based payment method for his electric cars that, according to many, causes a “climate disaster”. 

For this very reason, Musk had to withdraw the plan involving Bitcoin, promising to put it back in place once at least 50% of the energy used for BTC mining is renewable or green energy. 

A second intervention that sees Musk talk about cryptocurrencies in the interview concerns his general thoughts on money. In this regard, here is what Time Magazine quotes:

“[Musk] finds cryptocurrency interesting and can talk endlessly about the conception of money as “an information system for resource allocation. But he doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency, and disavows responsibility for the way his tweets have sent markets into a tizzy. Markets move themselves all the time, based on nothing as far as I can tell. So the statements that I make, are they materially different from random movements of the stock that might happen anyway? I don’t think so”.

Elon Musk and his influence in crypto markets

In his statement, Musk points out that “markets move on their own all the time”, highlighting how his well-known influence when backing Dogecoin and even Bitcoin, is not all that exclusive. 

And indeed, on the social network of crypto-lovers Twitter, it’s been a while since his tweets about DOGE have caused the price to “pump”, although it’s clear he’s not entirely unsympathetic. 

Earlier this month, within minutes of one of his tweets mentioning “Dooooge”, the market would have a very small reaction on the price of Dogecoin (DOGE) of +6.8% before falling back, bringing the gain to 3.5%. 

Something that even just a few months ago, would have seen price pumps on DOGE after his tweets of as much as 10%. Such as when he confirmed that he did not own Shiba Inu (SHIB), the ‘Dogecoin Killer’, but rather that in his crypto-wallet there were only and exclusively Bitcoin, Ethereum and, indeed, Dogecoin. 

Tesla and SpaceX: the ventures of Time Magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year

With regard to his two main companies, the Time Magazine interview points out that it was not always an easy task to get them to where they are today. 

Just over the Thanksgiving weekend, Elon Musk sent a letter to SpaceX employees warning that there is a risk that the company could go bankrupt next year. 

This is a consequence of the slowdown in the production of Raptor engines for the Starship rocket, which would lead to bankruptcy if at least one test flight of the spacecraft is not carried out once every fortnight next year. 

On the subject of Tesla, Musk had recently taken a poll on Twitter asking his 62.8 million followers whether or not he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares to pay taxes. 

Immediately after that message, the stock price took a downward turn, amounting to about 16% of the value, the equivalent of $200 billion lost.