Elon Musk-led electric car company, Tesla has revealed in a Monday SEC filing that the company has acquired $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin. Tesla says the move brings “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns” on its cash holdings.
The company also plans to roll out an option for customers to use bitcoin as payment while buying Tesla products, making it the first major car company to make such a move.
Interestingly, the latest development comes roughly a month after a famous Twitter exchange between Tesla CEO, Elon Musk and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor. The latter had offered to disclose to Musk the blueprint that his company used to invest over $425 million into bitcoin.
Since then, however, and in recent weeks, Elon Musk has come out to public praise bitcoin, added and removed ‘bitcoin’ from his Twitter bio, and led a pump for popular meme cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
Among the most popular of those ‘weird’ moves, it is worth noting that the most popular hint Musk gave was the tweet shortly after adding #bitcoin to his bio. He tweeted:
In retrospect, it was inevitable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2021
Bitcoin Hits New All-Time High
The price of Bitcoin hit an all-time high above $44,800 following news that Tesla has added bitcoin to its treasury reserve. The leading cryptocurrency trades at a $43,720 price at press time, with the pullback largely attributed to key exchanges going temporarily offline because of increased demand.
Tesla has now joined MicroStrategy and Square as publicly-traded U.S companies to hold bitcoin in their reserves, while a flock of other corporations could follow their footsteps.
