Bitcoin (BTC) Trades 36% Below Energy Value After Elon Musk's Energy-Money Remarks

Elon Musk's Energy Money Meets an Existing Answer

Elon Musk believes the money of the future will be measured in physics rather than dollars, and analyst Charles Edwards counters that Bitcoin (BTC) already runs on that standard. Musk made the case to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, on The Builders podcast, in an interview taped in early August and released on October 20. He argued that artificial intelligence and robotics will make labor and profit largely irrelevant, yet stopped short of predicting the end of currency. In his view, money would eventually be measured in "fundamental physics metrics" such as power, mass and energy, and conventional money "will not matter in the future." He never named Bitcoin in the conversation. A clip of the remarks spread within hours, shared by Bitcoin Archive. The idea is also not new for him: in June he wrote on X that mass and energy would replace the dollar, and the prediction comes from the world's richest person, whose net worth trackers place near $920 billion. Still, money anchored to energy describes the one property proof-of-work builds into a network, and Edwards, founder of Capriole Investments, responded within hours. His 2019 Energy Value model derives a fair price from the electricity miners spend, taking hashrate, hardware efficiency, supply growth (a schedule the Bitcoin halving cycle governs) and a fixed dollar-per-joule constant as inputs. Capriole holds that price reverts toward that value over time, and, unlike scarcity-based models, it falls to zero if every miner switches off. Against an Energy Value of $131,057, the Bitcoin (BTC) price near $83,264, up 2.3% in 24 hours, leaves a gap of roughly 36%. Closing it would take a gain of about 57%. Historically, price ran above the line at the 2013, 2017 and 2021 peaks and below it at the 2015, 2018, 2020 and 2022 lows. This cycle broke that pattern: Bitcoin (BTC) tracked the line through 2024 and 2025 without a speculative premium.

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Hashrate Held While Price Halved

On-chain hashrate data shows the computing power securing Bitcoin topping 1.1 zettahashes per second (ZH/s) in October 2025. Since then the metric has dipped toward 900 exahashes per second (EH/s) as pressure built on crypto mining operators, and it has now climbed back above 1 ZH/s. The dollar side of the ledger moved far more. The asset's dollar price nearly halved from its October 2025 record before building a floor near $60,000 in June. The energy behind the network barely shifted while its market value did, which is exactly the behavior an energy-anchored measure of money implies. That stability is the point for an energy-standard valuation: the underlying resource miners committed changed little even as sentiment swung hard. A production-cost reading points in the same direction: JPMorgan's recent estimate puts the cost of producing one Bitcoin (BTC) at $85,000, just above the current spot level. When spot sits under the estimated cost of production, the average miner is running at a loss on that math. The comparison has limits. Hashrate is a proxy rather than a power meter, because newer machines extract more hashes per watt. Bitcoin also answers only half of Musk's formula: the proof-of-work design ties the asset to energy, but nothing ties it to mass. Musk may also mean energy itself as the unit of account, with no token involved at all. His own record cuts both ways: in May 2021 Tesla suspended Bitcoin payments for cars, citing the fossil fuels burned in mining. That decision remains part of the public record his newer framing has to answer. On that scale, the heavy power draw once raised against the asset is the property that matches the energy-standard money Musk describes, which places it closer to that future than the dollar. Whether either benchmark pulls the market higher is a separate question the tape has not answered.

Our Bitcoin coverage reads the two threads as pointing the same way. The energy securing the network held nearly flat while the dollar value halved, which gives the energy-value argument empirical footing, and a production-cost estimate of $85,000 above a spot price of $83,264 fits the same undervaluation frame. For market structure, our Bitcoin technical analysis maps resistance at $87,000–$87,800, and macro timing risk clusters into the Fed's October 28 decision. Until price closes those gaps, the 36% discount stays a model reading rather than a market verdict. The model's weakest link is one its own record flags: hashrate measures effort, not watts, so the energy line itself shifts whenever machine efficiency changes, and the dollar-per-joule constant is set, not observed.