Musk told a jury most crypto is a scam. X is building the trading funnel anyway.
Musk Tells Jury Crypto Is a Scam. His Platform Is Betting He Is Wrong.
Elon Musk spent three days on the witness stand this week explaining to a federal jury in Oakland how cryptocurrency works — and how little of it he trusts.
"Some of them have merit, but most of them are scams," Musk said from the witness stand, according to reporters inside the courtroom, including The Washington Post and Business Insider, which covered the trial this week. The context was his $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI: he was describing why the organization considered but ultimately rejected a token sale in 2018. Eight years later, Musk's position on crypto has hardened into something closer to outright dismissal. Tesla sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings in mid-2022, marked down its remaining 11,509 Bitcoin by $222 million in Q1 2026, and Musk has spent years calling digital assets speculative and environmentally wasteful.
The same week, X quietly completed the rollout of Cashtags to web browsers, its feature for surfacing real-time stock and crypto data. The product, which launched on iPhone in mid-April and went live on web in late April, has already driven an estimated $1 billion in trading volume through a pilot partnership with Canadian brokerage Wealthsimple, according to posts from product head Nikita Bier. The rollout covers both digital assets and traditional equities, positioning X as a unified surface for market discussion rather than just a social feed.
Musk did not coordinate the courtroom testimony with the engineering roadmap. The trial schedule and the product launch have no obvious connection. But the juxtaposition is now unavoidable: the world's most prominent public crypto skeptic runs a platform that is actively building crypto and equities trading infrastructure into its core experience.
Musk had initially supported the idea of an OpenAI token sale in 2018, internal notes reviewed by CoinDesk show, before dropping the concept and leaving the organization that year. His testimony this week was the first time the jury heard him explain those views at length — and the first time his courtroom crypto skepticism and X's commercial crypto move have occupied the same news cycle.
Tesla's remaining Bitcoin position is not trivial. The company held 11,509 Bitcoin at the end of March 2026, valued at $786 million in its SEC filing — a position large enough that Musk's own shareholders have ongoing exposure to the volatility he cites as reason for skepticism. The Q1 $222 million impairment reflects the same price swings he has repeatedly called a sign of things to avoid.
X's Cashtags feature does not give users direct crypto price exposure. It connects to brokerage partners — currently Wealthsimple in Canada — for actual trades. But it is designed to make digital asset discussion and trading a more natural part of the X feed. The feature has been in testing since at least February, when Bier first described it as a major financial product. By mid-April, he was citing $1 billion in associated trading volume from the pilot.
The broader question — whether a man who built much of his public brand on provocative financial takes has an obligation to reconcile his courtroom skepticism with his platform's commercial instincts — is one the jury in Oakland is not being asked to answer. The market, and X's users, may answer it instead.