Tesla Chief, Elon Musk has cleared the air about the recent earning report regarding the dumping of Bitcoin. While pump and dump is a regular affair in the cryptocurrency industry, this time, it was car-manufacturing behemoth Tesla that sold an amount of its holding of the digital asset.
Tesla reportedly cashed out a total of $272 million in Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2021 after its high-profile massive cryptocurrency investment earlier this year. The automaker had purchased a whopping $1.5 billion worth of BTC in February and sold 10% of its holdings. It generated a profit of $101 million in the crypto-asset.
Elon Musk Clears The Air
Speculations regarding potential market manipulation arose, but its co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk has set the record straight. While responding to a tweet from Dave Portnoy, an American internet celebrity blogger, Musk went on to confirm that Tesla sold 10% of its Bitcoin holdings to prove the digital asset’s liquidity as an alternative to holding cash on the balance sheet.
He also went on to confirm retaining his personal investment in the cryptocurrency.
Musk has been known to hype the space on Twitter. The exec has advocated about Bitcoin as well as meme-coin Dogecoin. His tweets have driven the price of these two assets soaring to wild levels this bull season.
The disclosure came as part of Elon Musk’s firm’s Q1 earnings report earlier this week. The company revealed a total of $10.39 billion in revenue and made a profit of $438 million for the 3-month period ending 31st of March. Its CFO Zachary Kirkhorn had also revealed that the company intends to continue adding BTC to its balance sheet from the sales of its automobiles.
The exec was quoted saying,
“We do believe long-term in the value of Bitcoin. It is our intent to hold what we have long-term and continue to accumulate Bitcoin from transactions from our customers as they purchase vehicles.”
On the other hand, Bitcoin’s price has surged back to $54K-levek after Tesla Inc. reported the gain on “digital assets”. It was up by nearly 3% over the last 24-hours.