This is a terrible way to go through life. Just because someone is successful at X does not mean they are in any way knowledgeable in Y. Want to know about something, just read about it yourself or seek the opinion of someone that actually works in the field, don't blindly take the word of someone that is not even from the field in question.

Doge is a joke crypto currency, and I don't mean that as an insult I mean it was literally started as a joke by the developers to make fun of the crazy crypto speculation. Elon latched onto it as part of a joke and I think it just spiraled out of his control and he does not want to admit to being out of his league. He even alluded to this in his SNL skit.

Would you go to a world renown brain surgeon for advice on what is wrong with your car engine? Of course not but the brain surgeon is likely a very smart person surrounded by other very smart people. Car engines are just not their fields of expertise, much like cryptocurrencies are not Elon's. Elon is a meme lord, and goes to where the social media attention is. I am a huge fan of the guy but pretty much ignore everything he says outside of renewables and space because that's his wheel house. Don't get trapped in cults of personality.

Want to understand crypto, follow the people that are building in it. I recommend:

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin https://twitter.com/aantonop

Someone that understands crypto second to none but acts like he does not while delivering incredible content: https://twitter.com/cobie

want someone smart that lives in the space that is anti - crypto: https://twitter.com/nntaleb

> He knows more than I do, is surrounded by people smarter than I am and has a track record of success and overcoming failures.

He's also got a track history of being massively wrong at times on things that aren't inside his wheelhouse, like confidently predicting the end of COVID by April 2020.

> He knows more than I do

What do you base this on? I mean, how are you assessing his level of knowledge in this domain?

He has some amazing successes, but also has a terrible track record in terms of what he says vs what he actually delivers, he is more often way off the mark than he is accurate.

https://www.elonmusk.today/

I read them. "Insightful" is not the word I would use.

For example, one of the points is that the current financial system is problematic because it runs on COBOL. There's no actual criticism as to why running on COBOL is bad, other than the indirect insinuation that COBOL is old, not modern, and therefore it sucks. Basically, it's futurism for the sake of futurism--new is inherently better than old, and anything that is old is attacked as being bad without analyzing the relative benefits of new and old (see also Musk's comments about Hyperloop and Loop, which are severely lacking in the 'mass' department compared to the 'mass transit' options they are notionally competing against).

It is possible to be insightful about issues with the current financial system. You could point to issues like the reliance on unsecured FTP of text files to actually do settlement in SWIFT. Or you might point to issues like the fact that ATH doesn't have protections against unscrupulous users stealing all your money. That kind of information would be insightful, but instead, we get mere castigation at the age of COBOL, which is completely orthogonal to any actual issues with the financial systems.

Outside of this dismissal because of COBOL, the only other main point that Musk makes is, well, the standard libertarian viewpoint on economy that inflation is a hidden government tax. But even here, it's not fully developed--perhaps because the "benefit" of dogecoin over bitcoin is that the former has more inflation than the latter, and if you think about it too hard, you might be poking holes in his argument.

In any case, "insightful" is not an adequate adjective to describe Musk's comments here.

...because Musk bought PayPal, he can speak authoritatively on Bitcoin?