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Elon Musk Named Time’s Person of the Year, Says Crypto Unlikely to Replace Fiat

The Tesla CEO said he finds cryptocurrency interesting and can talk endlessly about the concept of money.

Updated May 11, 2023, 7:09 p.m. Published Dec 13, 2021, 7:59 p.m.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Time Magazine named Elon Musk its Person of the Year for 2021 on Monday, and in an interview with the publication the world’s richest person said he “doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency.”

  • Time called 2021 “the year of Elon Unbound,” given the many notable statements, actions and accomplishments of Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
  • Musk said he finds cryptocurrency interesting and can talk endlessly about the concept of money as “an information system for resource allocation.” But he said he doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency.
  • Musk recently made it on CoinDesk’s Most Influential list because of his outsized influence, both positive and negative, on crypto in 2021 – specifically on the price of bitcoin and dogecoin.
  • Regarding this often-criticized influence, Musk told Time that “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.”
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Read more: Most Influential 2021: Elon Musk - CoinDesk

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