Elon Musk Calls Most Crypto ‘Scams’ as X Builds Finance Layer
In the news today, Elon Musk, testifying before an Oakland jury in his civil trial against OpenAI, was questioned about the company’s abandoned 2018 plan to raise capital through a crypto initial coin offering. He stated that ‘some of them have merit, but most of them are scams,’ characterizing the broad crypto market in terms sharper than any prior public statement.
At the same timeX also rolled out web Cashtags, a feature that turns BTC, ETH, DOGE, XRP, and major stock tickers into real-time market pages with asset-specific post news feeds, positioning the platform explicitly as a trading terminal according to X’s head of product, Nikita Bier.
This is not a contradiction. It is a deliberate strategy to discredit the unregulated open token market while building a controlled, licensed financial ecosystem inside a walled platform, one where Musk, not the market, determines which assets merit inclusion.
JUST IN: Elon Musk says most cryptocurrencies are "scams" during OpenAI court testimony.
"Some of them have merit, but most of them are scams."
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) April 30, 2026
News suspect Musk’s public posture on crypto scams is less a statement of personal conviction than a calculated regulatory signal, directed at the state licensing authorities from whom X Payments has been acquiring money transmitter licenses across more than 25 U.S. states, and at the institutional partners whose cooperation a serious fintech integration requires.
By positioning himself as a skeptic of speculative tokens, Musk creates political and regulatory distance between X’s financial infrastructure and the market conduct that has drawn sustained SEC enforcement scrutiny, effectively arguing, before regulators need to ask, that X is building something categorically different from what has failed elsewhere.
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X Payments News and the Cashtags Architecture: How the Controlled Crypto Integration Actually Functions
The mechanism functions as follows: X is constructing a financial layer inside the platform – X Payments, the operational entity – that operates on money transmitter licenses rather than on the loose frameworks that have historically governed crypto exchanges and token launchpads.
The Cashtags rollout is the consumer-facing surface of that architecture, giving users price charts and curated social feeds for specific assets without routing them to external exchanges or unvetted token markets. Bier framed the product’s ambition directly, stating that ‘now X can be a core part of your trading terminal with real-time charts and posts for every asset’ – language that implies execution capability to come, not merely market surveillance.
The assets currently featured in Cashtags – BTC, ETH, DOGE, XRP, alongside equities – are not random. They represent the most liquid, most regulated, and most institutionally legible end of the crypto market: assets with established custodial infrastructure, exchange listings under regulatory oversight, and, in most cases, clear legal status in major jurisdictions.
Tesla’s own balance sheet provides a precedent for this selection logic – the company purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in 2021, sold most of its position in 2022, and still held 11,509 BTC through Q1 of this year, according to quarterly filings, a position valued at approximately $750 million at prevailing prices. Musk has never held a comparable position in any of the tokens he has implicitly or explicitly criticized.
The regulatory scaffolding X is building also fits the emerging legislative environment. The White House’s push for stablecoin policy clarity through frameworks like the GENIUS Act suggests that licensed, dollar-denominated digital payments – precisely what X Payments is architected around – will occupy a more defensible regulatory position than open-market token trading.
A money transmitter license does not authorize crypto asset trading, but it does establish the compliance infrastructure on which more expansive financial products can be layered as legislative clarity improves.
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