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Tesla CEO Elon Musk sits in a car arriving at the construction site for a new Tesla car in Gruenheide near Berlin, northeastern Germany on May 17, 2021. Photo: Odd Andersen/AFP (Getty Images)
Elon Musk sent the price of bitcoin higher Sunday night after a positive tweet about the cryptocurrency, which closely tracked Musk’s tweets over the past six months. The SpaceX founder also revealed that his electric car company, Tesla, has sold nearly 10% of his bitcoin holdings.
Musk, the world’s second-richest person, was responding to a tweet from crypto news outlet CoinTelegraph accusing the billionaire of running a pump-and-dump scheme when he revealed his latest findings.
“This is inaccurate. Tesla only sold about 10% of holdings to confirm that BTC can easily be liquidated without moving the market,” Musk tweeted on Sunday, using the Bitcoin acronym.
Oh, sure. It is perfectly normal to sell multi-million dollar assets…to test the market. This is just smart business and not a sign of trying to get rid of your monopoly money.
Musk went on to explain that he will allow Tesla to accept bitcoin as payment for electric cars once the energy consumed for mining the cryptocurrency reaches around 50% renewable.
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“When there is confirmation of the reasonable use of clean energy (~50%) by miners with a positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions,” Musk tweeted.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are notorious for being harmful to the environment, consuming huge amounts of energy to function properly. Musk started accepting bitcoin for Teslas back in March but stopped in May when the billionaire said he was concerned that the cryptocurrency was harmful to the environment.
The strange part, of course, is that nothing has changed from an environmental point of view in the period when Tesla accepted bitcoin. Everyone knew Musk was bad for the environment when Musk started taking bitcoin, and there’s no way someone like Musk could have been ignorant of the environmental impact before he made that decision.
Bitcoin is currently around $39,200, up 9.64% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk. This is still a long way from all-time highs at $64,829, but bitcoin enthusiasts should be excited that it is moving in a positive direction after Musk’s tweets in the past few months caused the price to drop.
Musk knows what he’s doing by manipulating the bitcoin market with his tweets, but he still has a certain level of plausible deniability, if only because the market isn’t regulated in any serious way. The only question left is whether the crowd of Musk followers realize the whole thing is bad before they empty their bank accounts on the wrong side of Musk’s crypto roller coaster. We will not hold our breath.
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