Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
Update: Apparently ElonΒ tweeted this morningΒ that Tesla hasΒ notΒ sold the balance of their BTC.
As anybody following along so far knows,Β Elon says a lot of thingsβ¦.Β
If true his actions to lend credence to the idea that heβs now grappling with unintended consequences of shit-talking Bitcoin while deriving bulk of his realized and unrealized βearningsβ fromβ¦ Bitcoin.
Not exactly 4D chess, but hey, weβre just mere mortals.
As we detailed earlier, with Elon Musk pulling his notorious flip/flop on Bitcoin, a couple of theories hit me on whatβs 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.
Itβs one thing to put out a PR saying βWe now accept crypto-currency Xβ and garner all the media hype around that, especially if youβre Elon Musk, andΒ especiallyΒ if youβre already long somewhere north of 42,000 BTC.
Itβs another to actually be pulling in transactions in Bitcoin, given that doing so for a TeslaΒ wasnβt exactly easy. Tesla didnβt 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 wouldnβt be any earnings to report in the Q1 βearningsβ call).
Nobody mentioned, or askedΒ on the callΒ 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 saidΒ βNot quite sure if anything sold yet in bitcoin.β
MyΒ guessΒ 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 acidΒ as was rumoured to be the caseΒ about the infamous βfunding securedβΒ tweet.
Whatever the reason, itβs possible Elon didnβt envision the shitstorm this would cause in crypto circles, or maybe heΒ didΒ know and derives some manner of narcissistic supply from it. Maybe hisΒ cringeworthy flameout on SNLΒ 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 heβs 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 hadnβt already liquidated Teslaβs remaining Bitcoin, heβs 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 thereβs a reason to get excited about something and spikes up over 100K on newsworthy items like Coinbase DPO, hashrate flash crashes, et alβ¦

ViaΒ data.bitcoinity.org
Continued …