Elon Musk Said Bitcoin Has No Throat to Choke: Why Does That Matter?

A 2021 clip of Elon Musk making his case for Bitcoin (BTC) is circulating again. His main argument was not scarcity. It was that Bitcoin has no throat to choke.

He meant there is nobody to threaten. No single party can be forced to empty the system. Five years on, filings show what his own companies did with that idea.

Why Elon Musk Framed Bitcoin as an Information System

Musk spoke in July 2021 at The B Word, a one-day conference he joined alongside Jack Dorsey and Cathie Wood.

He opened by redefining money itself. He called it an information system for allocating labor.

Then he went after the plumbing. Bank settlement still takes one to five business days. He called the ACH network ancient and insecure. Paying by card, he said, is like handing a stranger your password.

Bitcoin’s edge, in his telling, was not speed. It was that nobody can be leaned on.

“Bitcoin per se is mostly solving for … having no throat to choke, decentralized, so there’s no one who can be coerced in any way to empty their bitcoin account,” Elon Musk, at The B Word conference, July 2021.

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In plain terms, there is no head office to raid. There is no chief executive to lean on.

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What Tesla and SpaceX Actually Did

Musk named the flaws in the same breath.

“Transaction volume is low, transaction cost is high and usability for the average person is not yet very good, but it has a lot of potential.”

He had already wavered once. Two months before the panel, he stopped Tesla accepting bitcoin for cars, blaming mining emissions.

The harder test came 11 months later. Tesla had bought $1.50 billion of bitcoin in early 2021. By mid-2022 it had converted roughly 75% of that into cash, a filing shows. The sales raised $936 million.

SpaceX did the opposite. Its Bitcoin has not moved in any period it has ever disclosed.

Every SpaceX filing since 2024 lists the same 18,712 BTC at the same $661 million cost. Only the value changes. It was $1.75 billion at the end of 2024 and $1.10 billion in June.

That grip held through pressure. In July, an $88 test transfer triggered sale rumors. Weeks later its debut earnings report booked a $539 million paper loss for the half and kept every coin.

Tesla’s leftover 11,509 BTC cost $386 million and has sat still since 2022. Its second quarter results logged a further $334 million decline over the half. Together the two hold 30,221 BTC for about $1.05 billion.

At a current price near $78,570, that is worth roughly $2.37 billion.

So the answer is plain. Nobody can force either company to sell. Tesla did anyway, once, by choice. That is the part no ledger protects against.