Tesla Inc. and SpaceX Inc. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk (pictured) is a big bitcoin fan, praising the cryptocurrency on a podcast with investment firm ARK Invest Tuesday.

In the interview, which primarily focused on Musk’s companies, the interviewer asked the Paypal alumnus about his views on cryptocurrency.

“I think the bitcoin structure was quite brilliant. It seems like there’s some merit to Ethereum as well, and maybe some of the others,” Musk said. “Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that’s for sure, but it has its pros and cons.”

On the negative side, Musk said that “computationally, is that it’s quite energy intensive. So there have to be some kind of constraints on the creation of crypto.” He added that “I’m not sure that it would be a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto.”

Musk has touched on cryptocurrency in the past, tweeting in October about buying bitcoin, which he now claims was a joke: “Bitcoin and Ethereum scammers were so rampant on Twitter I decided to join in and I said at one point wanna buy some bitcoin? Then I got my account suspended ’cause obviously there was like some automatic rule that if you try to sell bitcoin or something, and I was just joking.”

A month later, Musk’s name was used by scammers who managed to hack a number of “blue check mark” or verified Twitter accounts to promote bitcoin scams.

The praise from Musk, while welcomed among cryptocurrency evangelists, did nothing in terms of the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. After briefly trading over $4,000 on Monday, bitcoin continues to tease the mark, trading in a range of $3,800 to $3,960. As of 9:45 p.m. EST, it was trading at $3,917.33.

Photo: 137687407@N05/Flickr