Thus, money is not “an abstract representation of real things” or a database. It is an economic good that we value for the unique services that money offers. Holding money removes the uncertainty associated with future exchanges—we don’t know what or when we will buy in the future, nor the exact prices of things we will purchase in the future, so we hold cash.

This insight matters because if you don’t understand why people hold money, you start to slip into the thinking that cash balances are “idle,” or held for no good reason, and ought to be plundered by the state or stimulated into circulation for the sake of kickstarting the velocity of money or aggregate demand.

Money is, has been and always will be a good, itself. Although you do not hold money for itself, you hold money to buy things — goods, in the future. Musk must have been speed reading or skimming the Friedmanite economics books he was purusing reading and not taking in the details. I can’t recall ever reading ”money is a database”, myself.