Elon Musk says he spends hardly any time at all thinking about cryptocurrency

“I don't spend a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrency — hardly any at all,” Musk said in an X space conversation with Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood on Dec. 21, in response to Wood’s question on bitcoin’s potential impact on the financial system.

“I have thought for a long time about money and the nature of money,” Musk continued. “What is money? It's really a database for resource allocation.”

Musk added that fiat currency is “actually fine as a database for resource allocation” provided that it’s rules-based and there’s not much abuse from the government.

Musk said that he would think of the money system as applying information theory to money problems. “Just think of it like it's an information system,” he said. “You want to minimize noise, minimize latency, minimize packet loss. And so inflation would be adding noise to the system.”

Musk’s comment comes as his firm Tesla appears to continue to hold digital assets on its balance sheet. Tesla’s third-quarter results showed that the company held $184 million worth of digital assets at the end of September. 

The electric vehicle maker has the third-largest bitcoin holdings among publicly traded companies, following MicroStrategy and Marathon Digital Holdings, according to data from bitcointreasury.net . Tesla also accepts Dogecoin for payment.