When Money Dies: A Century-Long Prophecy

A monetary system anchored to energy is a system anchored to reality. 

Kyle McClay | October 23, 2026

Elon Musk said it plainly on the Builders podcast with Walter Isaacson this month: “I think currency will be measured in fundamental physics metrics like, you know, power, like wattage and tonnage, mass and energy.” Dollars, he argued, won’t be the unit of measure in the future. Energy will. Not as metaphor. As ledger.

It sounds radical. It isn’t. It’s a prophecy three of history’s most consequential minds made over a span of a hundred and twenty-six years, each from a different angle, each missing only the final piece. Bitcoin is that piece.

Start with Nikola Tesla. In February 1892, lecturing before the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London, the inventor broke from his technical remarks into something stranger. “Ere many generations pass,” he said, “our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe… Throughout space there is energy… it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.” He spent the next decade trying to build it.

Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island was meant to broadcast power through the Earth itself, no wires, no middlemen, energy delivered to any point on the globe. The tower fell to creditors before it ever sang. But the thesis survived: energy, freely transmissible, would reorganize civilization.

Then came Henry Ford. On December 4, 1921, the New York Tribune put his proposal on the front page under the headline “Ford Would Replace Gold With Energy Currency and Stop Wars.” Ford’s idea was almost........

© American Thinker