Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed in an answer to a Tweet questioning his “pumping and dumping” Bitcoin scheme that Tesla, in actuality, sold Bitcoin in order to verify liquidity of Bitcoin as a possible substitute to cash holdings on a ledger.
Recently, Tesla published earning reports disclosing that the company sold a few of the Bitcoin tokens it had purchased at the beginning of the year for over $1 billion. The sale of said Bitcoin tokens earned Tesla a profit of $101 million.
Musk also further mentioned that he did not sell his own Bitcoin holdings. In his response to the questioning Twitter user, Musk elaborated that Tesla had sold a tenth of its Bitcoin holdings to substantiate the liquidity of the cryptocurrency.
At the beginning of this year, Tesla had revealed that it would be investing in more than $1 billion in Bitcoin. The company also claimed that it would start recognizing payments in Bitcoin for Tesla cars soon. This announcement had raised the value of Bitcoin despite it falling in the middle of April from its very peak worth $64,870.
Cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Dogecoin have also experienced huge profits for the year with DOGE’s success largely being attributed to Musk’s continued support. Zachary Kirkhorn, the CFO at Tesla, in a teleconference, expressed the company’s belief in Bitcoin’s value in the long term.
As of Tuesday, Bitcoin’s value was approximately valued at $53,500 after increasing in price by nearly 10% on Monday after five consecutive days of losses following the recent news that JPMorgan Chase is to propose a Bitcoin fund to their clients. At the beginning of this month, Bitcoin had collapsed nearly a fifth from its record peak and at one point was trading at $47k. These prices were only available for a small amount of time and things already look set to return to their previous peak.
