Tesla, Inc, the American electric vehicle and clean energy company headed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has now purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. Multiple reports on this day also indicated that the company is planning to start to accepting the cryptocurrency as payment.
The aforementioned purchase was confirmed in a filing at the United States Securities and Exchance Commission (SEC), which said that the company bought the said amount in Bitcoin for “more flexibility to further diversify” and “maximize returns on cash”.
In essence, once Tesla starts accepting Bitcoin, the company will be the world’s first major automaker to accept the cryptocurrency as payment. This news will boost up the demand for bitcoin wallets from different providers (Coinbase, Bitamp, etc.) as it will be the foremost requirement to make payment through Bitcoins.
Following the announcement, the prices for the digital asset peaked to a record high above $43,000, Bloomberg News reported.
Any sane individual seriously following the Reddit r/wallstreetbets row, aka the “Gamestop fiasco”, over the past couple of weeks also expectedly holds some idea about how the unlikeliest of circumstances have stunned stock market watchers in the recent past.
The recent announcement by Tesla also raises some questions about Musk himself, who has been tweeting out trigger words to influence stock prices for a while now.
Earlier last week, Musk had triggered a surge in Dogecoin’s price with a single word tweet “doge” on Thursday.
Dogecoin surged by over 50 per cent in the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinDesk.
In subsequent tweets, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said “Dogecoin is people’s crypto” and “No highs, no lows, only Doge”.
Dogecoin has surged 659 per cent this year.
This is not the first time Musk’s tweets caused a surge in the value of some companies.
His tweet about messaging platform Signal also led to a surge in the downloads of the app.
Last month, his post about retail website Etsy pushed the price of the company’s shares by as much as 8 per cent, according to a report in CNBC.
Musk, who has 45.2 million followers on Twitter, uses the micro-blogging platform mainly to make announcements about his future plans.
(With inputs from agencies)
