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Why Elon Musk’s Fort Knox Audit Matters for Bitcoin
The Lightbulb Moment for the Masses
Teeka Tiwari & Houston Molnar
March 03, 2025
Editor’s note: Late last night, we had some breaking news we wanted to notify readers about before getting into today’s issue.
President Trump officially announced a crypto strategic reserve for the United States.
His directive included that bitcoin will be part of the reserve along with a handful of other digital currencies. The price of bitcoin shot up about 12% overnight on the news.
President Trump also mentioned Cardano and Ripple as tokens that could go into this reserve in his message on social media. They soared 82% and 35%, respectively, on the news.
This is incredibly bullish for the entire crypto ecosystem. And it’s something we’ve been writing to you about for weeks. We’ll dive deeper into this breaking news in the next issue of Digital Asset Daily.
Why Elon Musk’s Fort Knox Audit Matters for Bitcoin
In January 2019, a Boeing 777 flew 6,000 miles from Moscow to Venezuela to retrieve 20 tons of gold.
According to reports at the time, the plane carried a contingent of armed guards and was escorted to its destination by fighter jets.
Some speculated Russia was transporting Venezuelan gold reserves to the United Arab Emirates to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s government.
Where – and to whom – the plane transported over 40,000 pounds of gold remains a mystery to this day. The details have never been made public.
But when I first read this story, it was a “lightbulb moment.”
Despite its reputation as a store of value, when you start digging deeper, you realize gold isn’t as alluring of an asset as most people think it is.
As I read the report, all I could think about were the millions of dollars wasted on airplanes, armed guards, and fighter jets just to transport the gold from one location to another.
Besides the millions of dollars needed to transport the gold, the transaction itself was incredibly risky.
What if organized criminals tried to hijack the plane?
What if the plane had to make an emergency landing in another country?
What if the amount or purity of gold was less than what Venezuela had claimed?
These questions led me to that lightbulb moment. And it highlighted how I’d never need to ask those questions if the asset in question was bitcoin. From that day on, I was buying hand over fist.
Just think about it… Settling that 20-ton gold transaction would be far less complicated if it were in bitcoin than gold.
For example, in February 2024 someone moved 26,137 bitcoins valued at roughly $1.3 billion for just $2.
Try moving $1.3 billion of gold through an airport or across an ocean. It’s virtually impossible unless you have an army or navy backing you.
But with bitcoin, you can carry billions of dollars in assets through an airport on a flash drive and no one would know.
This edge bitcoin has over gold is one of the most bullish reasons everyone should own some.
And the reason I’m telling you this story today is because I think millions of people are about to have their own “lightbulb moment,” too. And it involves a potential audit of one of the world’s most famous gold vaults: Fort Knox.
How Much Gold Is Actually in Fort Knox?