Musk warned America will go 1,000% bankrupt. Now U.S. debt tops $40 trillion and
Elon Musk’s two biggest companies are sitting on 30,221 Bitcoin. At Bitcoin’s Oct. 31 close of $77,424, those coins are worth about $2.34 billion. SpaceX owns more than 60% of them.
The rocket maker disclosed 18,712 BTC in its IPO filing, bought for about $661 million, or roughly $35,000 a coin. That stake is now worth about $1.45 billion, more than double its cost.
Related: Elon Musk warns America will 1,000% go bankrupt and fail as a country
Tesla holds the other 11,509 BTC, worth about $891 million.Those coins carry new weight as the U.S. debt clock pushes past $40.6 trillion, a number Musk has spent the year calling a path to national bankruptcy.
Musk’s crypto ties run beyond his own balance sheets.
When he mocked Binance after its record $6.3 billion hack last week, co-founder Changpeng Zhao reminded him that the exchange’s $500 million bet on his Twitter takeover is now worth more than $1 billion in SpaceX shares.
Musk’s case for America’s bankruptcy
In a February podcast where he warned the U.S. is heading for bankruptcy.
“We are 1000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country without AI and robots,” Musk said on the Dwarkesh Podcast in February this year. “Nothing else will solve the national debt.”
Nine months later, the U.S. national debt stands at about $40.6 trillion, according to the latest information from Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s debt clock, which tracks Treasury data.
That works out to $118,939 for every person in the country. Interest alone costs the government more than $2.8 billion a day, and the foundation projects it will nearly double within a decade.
Borrowing costs are rising too. The 30-year Treasury yield climbed above 5.7% in early October, its highest since 2002, while the 10-year topped 5.3%.
Musk led President Donald Trump’s DOGE cost-cutting effort for about four months in 2025. He now says that experience proved spending cuts won’t get there.
“The only way we’re going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots,” Musk told biographer Walter Isaacson in an interview that premiered Oct. 20. “We’re not gonna solve it by trying to save our way there.”
He also admitted he “got carried away” during his time in Washington.
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Why Bitcoin bulls are watching
Bitcoin’s capped supply of 21 million coins has made it a popular pitch as a hedge against runaway government debt and money printing.
Musk has made that argument himself. “Bitcoin is based on energy: you can issue fake fiat currency, and every government in history has done so, but it is impossible to fake energy,” he wrote on X in October 2025.
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