Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Update: Apparently Elon tweeted this morning that Tesla has not sold the balance of their BTC.

As anybody following along so far knows, Elon says a lot of things…. 

If true his actions to lend credence to the idea that he’s now grappling with unintended consequences of shit-talking Bitcoin while deriving bulk of his realized and unrealized “earnings” from… Bitcoin.

Not exactly 4D chess, but hey, we’re just mere mortals.

As we detailed earlier, with Elon Musk pulling his notorious flip/flop on Bitcoin, a couple of theories hit me on what’s going on. The first is strictly a hunch and the second is inferred from just a quick look at the numbers.

Those theories are:

Tesla may have never sold a single vehicle for Bitcoin.

It’s one thing to put out a PR saying “We now accept crypto-currency X” and garner all the media hype around that, especially if you’re Elon Musk, and especially if you’re already long somewhere north of 42,000 BTC.

It’s another to actually be pulling in transactions in Bitcoin, given that doing so for a Tesla wasn’t exactly easy. Tesla didn’t disaggregate their revenues by payment type in their Q1 report and their only mentions of Bitcoin were that they bought it, sold 10% and booked over $100 million in profits from doing so (as anybody following Tesla knows, between the Bitcoin profits and the carbon credits, there wouldn’t be any earnings to report in the Q1 “earnings” call).

Nobody mentioned, or asked on the call how many vehicles sales had been actually transacted in Bitcoin. The only reference I can find anywhere that speaks to this at all is an anonymous employee in the aforementioned Coindesk article who said “Not quite sure if anything sold yet in bitcoin.”

My guess is that for some reason, knowing that zero or very few transactions were occurring in Bitcoin, Musk saw a chance at what he thought would be a cost-free virtue signal and took it. Who knows why, maybe he was crawling under his kitchen table with a head full acid as was rumoured to be the case about the infamous “funding secured”  tweet.

Whatever the reason, it’s possible Elon didn’t envision the shitstorm this would cause in crypto circles, or maybe he did know and derives some manner of narcissistic supply from it. Maybe his cringeworthy flameout on SNL had him fuming and he wanted to take it out on the crypto-nerds while doubling down on Doge, who the hell knows.

What I do think is at some point Elon realized he’s still sitting on (checks calculations) about 38,000 to 40,000 BTC that were suddenly losing value rapidly. Now what?

This brings us to theory #2:

Elon Musk hadn’t already liquidated Tesla’s remaining Bitcoin, he’s doing it now.

My math is that buying $1.5B USD of BTC over February would have been acquired at roughly 35K each, which comes out to 42,857 BTC, of which they reported having sold 10%, so roughly 4,200. That would leave around 38K Bitcoin sitting on the Tesla balance sheet becoming more impaired by the minute.

Volume lately has been anywhere around 22K BTC on a slow news day to > 65K BTC per day if people think there’s a reason to get excited about something and spikes up over 100K on newsworthy items like Coinbase DPO, hashrate flash crashes, et al…

Via data.bitcoinity.org

Continued …