Mark Cuban and Elon Musk disagree on how to save the US economy

Billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are businessmen whose mere tweets can make investors gain, or lose, billions of dollars. While Bitcoin’s monetary policy is set in stone—the halving is just two days away—its price still tracks the stock market, according to a recent market report by SFOX. 

Bitcoin investors would therefore be wise to pay attention to public conversations about how to save the US economy from the coronavirus pandemic, which is rushing through America like a bullet train. 

Musk and Cuban are two outspoken public figures whose views reach 40 million people on Twitter. Both have the influence and personal wherewithal to affect the economy. That makes them worth paying attention to. What happens next in the US economy might just determine the future price of Bitcoin.

Musk is pushing for the economy to reopen

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, thinks that the lockdown is reckless, absurd and an encroachment to civil liberty. He has used Twitter to downplay the significance of the pandemic, a move that has courted controversy from scientists. In March, he pushed a coronavirus cure, citing a paper put together by two Bitcoin fans who relied on inconclusive evidence.

In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, published Thursday, Musk said: “This notion that you can just send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is not true, obviously. Some people have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty — it just makes stuff.” 

In the interview, Musk pointed out the obvious: “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.” And that’s going to reduce the gross domestic product of the US; in the first quarter of 2020, the US GDP dropped by 4.8%. “You can’t just legislate money and solve these things,” he said. 

He is pushing for the lockdown to end and wants his employees to go back to work. He has even threatened to move his factory out of California after local officials prevented its reopening. "Frankly, this is the final straw," Musk tweeted. "Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately.”

https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1259164792155144196?s=19

Cuban doesn’t things to go back to normal just yet 

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the investors on popular TV show Shark Tank, is more concerned by the lockdown and wants to slow things down.

In an interview with Forbes, published today, Cuban said some states are returning to normality too quickly. He wants people to think about ways to sustainably prolong the economy amid the pandemic. 

“We know that pick up and delivery works for online [shopping]. It works for food. It works for other products. We should extend what has worked for those businesses to all businesses. That should be the first step,” he said. 

He thinks that “the best way to truly reinvigorate the economy is to create consumer demand.” And he has an idea: put millions of people back to work through a federal jobs program to train people to deliver an “anonymous tracking, tracing and testing program and the data collection and analysis program that is required behind it. This would put millions back to work and provide much-needed confidence and demand.”

The people have spoken 

Both Musk and Cuban have completely different opinions about how to save the economy. But should their ideas become popular, they could go some way toward influencing the US economy. 

When global markets tanked in mid-March, Bitcoin’s price almost cut in half; they only fully recovered this week. The next move by the US government, if egged on by the billionaire oddballs, could decide the fate of Bitcoin.