Elon Musk has taken a sharper public tone on crypto, telling an Oakland jury that most cryptocurrencies are scams while testifying in his civil trial against OpenAI. The comment came during questions about an early OpenAI idea to raise money through an initial coin offering.
New York Times reporter Mike Isaac quoted Musk explaining crypto to the jury this way:
Some of them have merit, but most of them are scams.
The line landed hard because Musk has spent years as one of crypto’s most powerful attention engines, especially for Bitcoin and Dogecoin.
Musk’s history with the sector is not small. Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021, while Musk’s Dogecoin posts helped push DOGE into one of the most visible meme assets of the last cycle. Tesla later sold most of its Bitcoin reserves in 2022, but the company still held 11,509 BTC through Q1, according to recent market summaries tied to Tesla’s quarterly filing.
The latest comment does not mean Musk has rejected every crypto asset. It does show a clear split in his view: a few assets may have merit, but the wider token market remains full of projects he considers low-quality or fraudulent.
URL: https://x.com/MikeIsaac/status/2049575100342788274
URL: https://apnews.com/article/bdbe85d62c2b678458fe68148eb6fba5
URL: https://assets-ir.tesla.com/tesla-contents/IR/TSLA-Q1-2026-Update.pdf
The timing is interesting because X is moving deeper into finance at the same time. X head of product Nikita Bier said the platform is rolling out the web version of Cashtags, giving users real-time charts and asset-specific post feeds for stocks and crypto tickers.
Bier framed the rollout directly:
Now X can be a core part of your trading terminal with real-time charts and posts for every asset.
That puts X closer to becoming a market dashboard, not just a social feed where traders talk about prices.
The feature turns tickers such as BTC, ETH, DOGE, XRP, and stocks into clickable market pages. It fits Musk’s broader “everything app” push, where payments, market data, trading discussion, and financial services sit inside the same platform.
Musk’s warning also fits the reality of crypto trading on X. The platform is where narratives start, meme coins go viral, and late buyers often chase tokens after the first move is already over.
That same cycle played out this week when a trader lost $150,000 chasing the Scam Altman meme coin after a Musk post. The token had no link to OpenAI, Sam Altman, or Musk, but it turned a courtroom nickname into a fast Solana trade before collapsing.
Dogecoin remains the cleaner example of Musk-linked crypto attention surviving across cycles. DOGE recently reclaimed attention as traders watched for a May breakout, but even there, price action still depends on liquidity, sentiment, and broader market risk appetite.
The contradiction is the whole story. Musk says most crypto is scam-heavy, while X is building tools that make crypto and stock chatter easier to track in real time. That is not necessarily inconsistent. A trading terminal can surface legitimate assets and still help users avoid junk, but only if data quality, fraud filters, and token discovery controls are strong.
The challenge is that X’s biggest strength is also its biggest risk. The platform moves attention faster than almost anywhere else. That can help traders spot market moves early, but it can also turn weak tokens into viral traps.
Musk’s message is clear enough: crypto has winners, but most tokens do not deserve trust by default. X’s new Cashtags push will test whether the platform can become a serious trading layer without becoming an even faster engine for the scams Musk just called out.
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