The Man Who Made DOGE a Billion-Dollar Asset Said Most Crypto Is a Scam
Elon Musk was sitting in an Oakland courthouse on Wednesday, testifying in his lawsuit against OpenAI, when a question about cryptocurrency produced one of the trial’s most quoted lines.
“Some of them have merit, but most of them are scams.”
Three words from the man who turned Dogecoin, a token created as a joke, into a multi-billion dollar asset with a handful of social media posts and whose tweets moved crypto markets more reliably than any regulatory announcement.
His company also bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in 2021, whose cultural footprint helped create an entire ecosystem of meme tokens, including Asteroid Inu, that trade almost entirely on his name and persona.
The question worth asking is whether this is a genuine industry reality check or selective criticism shaped by personal rivalry with the man sitting across from him in court.
The Altman Shadow
The crypto comment did not arrive in a neutral setting. Musk is suing Sam Altman and OpenAI over what he describes as the conversion of a nonprofit into a commercial enterprise that enriched its leadership while abandoning its founding mission.
“They stole a charity,” he told the court. The specific question that prompted his crypto remark was about OpenAI’s abandoned 2018 plan to raise funds through a token offering, a plan OpenAI says Musk himself supported.
Worldcoin, Altman’s biometric identity token, has collapsed 98% from its peak market capitalisation. Musk amplified a major investigative piece about Altman’s conduct days before his courtroom appearance. His dismissal of most crypto as scams in that context is difficult to fully separate from the adversarial dynamic with Altman.
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The Record That Complicates Everything
Tesla sold 75% of its Bitcoin in 2022, largely missing the rally that pushed Bitcoin above $125,000 in 2024. The company still holds 11,509 Bitcoin valued at approximately $786 million, written down by $222 million in the first quarter of 2026, but still worth more than double its original $386 million cost.
What the Industry Heard
For a sector that spent years seeking legitimacy from exactly the kind of endorsement Musk once provided so freely, the courtroom comment carries a specific sting. Not because the observation is entirely wrong. But the man saying it helped build the cultural conditions that made the scams possible in the first place.
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