Elon Musk, one of the world’s more eccentric and innovative billionaires, has not shied away about dropping the name Bitcoin every now and again. Although, his stance on it has never been made too clear, and his lack of movement in the blockchain and crypto space has also been conspicuously absent.

From a couple of cryptic and light-hearted tweets about cryptocurrency first being his safe word, in April last year to him retracting said statement earlier in January stating Bitcoin is not his safe word, Musk has finally shed more light.

In a recent podcast, Musk was taken down the path on cryptocurrencies when the interviewers asked him about X.com, an online bank that through later mergers became PayPal. As an innovator in the online payment space, it is interesting to note that Musk’s main viewpoint on crypto is its uses for illegal activities.

No judgment

Must is quite aware that his position on crypto – that it can be used for illegal activities, is not a popular one. In fact, it is an opinion that many feels falls flat as fiat currency has the same issues, if not worse.

Overall though, Musk says he is “neither here nor there on Bitcoin.”

However, he did have time to praise Satoshi Nakamoto and his whitepaper which led to the creation of Bitcoin and blockchain, stating that it was “pretty clever.” He then went on to explain his stance on crypto as a tool for illegal activities, adding it: “gets the crypto people angry.”

“There are transactions that are not within the bounds of the law — there are obviously many laws in different countries — and normally cash is used for these transactions. But in order for illegal transactions to occur, the cash must also be used for legal transactions. You need an illegal-to-legal bridge. That’s where crypto comes in,” he said.

Still, this negative connotation associated with crypto was not being used by Musk as a reason to detract from it as he said he’s not being “judgmental about crypto.” In Musk’s view, the governments overreach in certain aspects too:

“I think there’s a lot of things that are illegal that shouldn’t be illegal. I think that sometimes governments just have too many laws about the missions that they should have, and shouldn’t have so many things that are illegal.”

