Musk Says Mass and Energy Will Replace the U.S. Dollar

[Financial News]  

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, said that in the space age, a new unit of value will emerge: not fiat currencies such as the United States dollar (USD), but "mass and energy."
He made the remark during a conversation with a user on his social media platform X on the 16th, local time.

A user named James Stevenson asked Musk, "Can you get even one-millionth of the Sun's energy just by synchronizing in Earth orbit?... Or do you need to launch many satellites into a solar orbit beyond Earth's gravity to achieve that goal?"
In response, Musk said that a factory should be built on the Moon.
He said that to secure one-millionth of the Sun's energy, "we need to build factories on the Moon to make solar panels and radiators," and added that "they must be launched into deep space through a mass driver."
A mass driver is a massive launch system that uses electromagnetic force to accelerate objects along a rail at extremely high speed and send them into space without rocket fuel. It is similar to a giant space railgun or a magnetic-launch space catapult.

Musk then said that traditional currencies such as the United States dollar will no longer be needed at some point.
He declared, "Mass and energy will take the place of the dollar."
Musk said this while noting that traditional money would already have become meaningless long before solar panels and radiators are launched from the Moon by mass driver.
He argued that paper money created by humans would have no meaning once civilization reaches the stage of a massive space society that produces goods in space and runs artificial intelligence.
Musk emphasized that what such a space civilization would need is energy, such as solar power, to run artificial intelligence and operate factories, as well as mass, meaning the amount of matter needed to actually produce spacecraft, solar panels, radiators and computer chips.
As the monetary paradigm shifts, he suggested, the total amount of matter secured in space and the power to use it will become the measure of national strength and wealth, replacing paper money.

[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter