Days after Elon Musk performed a sudden U-turn on Bitcoin over concerns about its energy usage, and saying his electric car firm Tesla will no longer accept the cryptocurrency as payment, the billionaire has now threatened to dump all the Bitcoin Tesla is holding.
Back in February, Elon’s Tesla announced it has bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it bought the bitcoin for “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.”
Tesla had also said it will start accepting payments in bitcoin in exchange for its products “subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis.” That would make Tesla the first major automaker to do so. The $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin was supposed to give Tesla liquidity in the cryptocurrency once it started accepting it for payments.
Elon would then go ahead to tweet that the company had opted to stop accepting bitcoin as payment over environmental concerns has been well-received by some of Tesla Inc’s investors, offering a warning to corporate peers mulling a dabble with the cryptocurrency.
The Tesla boss’ tweets, which had helped drive some of the gains in bitcoin in recent months, this week triggered a crypto crash in the value of the cryptocurrency when he said his company’s customers would no longer be able to use bitcoin to buy its cars.
Reacting to the crash crypto experts descended on the billionaire on popular microblogging platform Twitter ‘schooling’ him on how Bitcoin works leading to Elon threatening to dump Tesla’s entire Bitcoin portfolio.
An Elon musk tweeted the possibility of Tesla dump writing “Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings. With the amount of hate @elonmusk is getting, I wouldn’t blame him” to which Elon Responded “Indeed.”
Indeed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2021
What this means for the world’s largest crypto? we’ll have to wait and see
