Musk Claims Most Cryptocurrencies Are Scams During Court Hearing
According to Fortune magazine, Elon Musk's relationship with Sam Altman and OpenAI has severely deteriorated. During the court hearing for the OpenAI lawsuit in Oakland, his testimony revealed a cooling attitude towards cryptocurrencies.
When asked about cryptocurrencies, Musk stated, "Some of them are valuable, but most are scams." This remark was relayed by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac on social media.
This comment stemmed from a question about OpenAI's brief consideration of fundraising through an ICO in 2018, when OpenAI was still a nonprofit organization.
Musk accused OpenAI of violating the founding agreement after its partnership with Microsoft, claiming it "misappropriated a charitable organization."
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Musk, one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, had previously strongly supported the organization's nonprofit mission and provided initial funding. His testimony in this court hearing continues the trajectory of his public split with Altman after 2023, having previously initiated a lawsuit due to OpenAI's shift towards profit-making and deep ties with Microsoft. His stance on meme coins like DOGE has also fluctuated with market changes.
In terms of capital strategy, Musk is concentrating resources through entities like xAI on his own AI infrastructure and real-world applications, rather than the ICO path that early OpenAI considered. His motivation appears to be maintaining control over the AI mission and avoiding dilution, while using the 2018 ICO discussions as evidence in the lawsuit to argue that OpenAI has deviated from the founding agreement, shifting resources from OpenAI's profit-making subsidiary to competing entities like xAI.
Similar to Musk's previous cyclical statements on Bitcoin and Ethereum, or other tech founders' legal disputes over early collaborative projects, OpenAI is currently in a mature phase of transitioning from nonprofit to highly commercialized. Meanwhile, Musk is accelerating an independent AGI path through xAI.
Essentially, this represents a transfer of pricing power: Musk's public statements during the court hearing shift the narrative on cryptocurrency pricing from early promoters to cautious critics, with the mechanism being the use of OpenAI's ICO historical discussions as a litigation weapon, while the rise of entities like xAI separates AI capital from the broader cryptocurrency narrative, focusing on embodied intelligence and self-controlled infrastructure.