After Claiming That Elon Musk Is Bad for Crypto, Legendary Surfer Kelly Slater Shares Plan to Launch His Own Coin

In a recent interview with The Gentleman's Journal, Kelly Slater, who is known as the greatest surfer of all time, has revealed that he is mulling over launching his own cryptocurrency that will track the value of his wood recycling firm.

While the plan is still up in the air, the "Baywatch" star claims that it will not be just a "fly-by-night" coin:

We'll see if there's something we can do that's a positive one, and not a fly-by-night coin where people are just trying to make a quick buck overnight.

Slater jokingly dismissed the idea of calling his crypto "Woodcoin," saying that he will have to come up with better ideas.

Although the surfing legend admits that he is not a cryptocurrency expert, he does frequently discuss blockchain and is curious about Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, he is concerned about people manipulating crypto prices:

At the same time, it seems like there's people coming in who aren't in it for its purpose…it seems to me there's some manipulation going on with it and I'm afraid that's what happens with stocks and companies in that way.

Elon Musk is "bad" for crypto

In June, Slater said that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was "bad" for crypto.

While Musk had been occasionally tweeting about cryptocurrencies before, his name came to the fore this year after he fueled a massive bull run in meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, and Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in early February and later added the largest cryptocurrency as a payment method.

Despite contributing to the massive cryptocurrency rally with his social media influence and Tesla's dollars, Musk turned into a villain for the Bitcoin community overnight after he announced that the e-car maker would no longer accept Bitcoin for payments due to its CO2 footprint.

Instead of focusing on Bitcoin, Slater, who has 11 world championship wins, stated in his Instagram post that Musk needs to focus on more pressing environmental problems:

[Musk] could probably address and potentially help solve the real energy issues (68 percent of the energy produced in the US, for instance, is wasted…seems like a bigger issue to me which would solve any BTC problem.