Tesla Invests a Whopping $1.5 Billion into Bitcoin

It was just days ago that Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk revealed on social app Clubhouse that he had regretted getting into cryptocurrency bitcoin earlier.

Well now he may be making up for lost time because Tesla disclosed in an SEC filing that the company invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin in January, and aims “to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future.”

This is 10% of Tesla’s cash reserves, and is considered the largest corporate purchase of bitcoin ever. The company is the first automaker to make such a move.

Bitcoin’s price soared on the news and hit a new all-time high of over $47,000.

Square bought $50 million worth of bitcoin in October and cloud services provider MicroStrategy has 71,079 bitcoin, worth more than $3 billion as of Monday morning.

PayPal’s CEO Dan Schulman said last week that crypto trading volume has “exceeded expectations” and that the company’s crypto efforts so far are “just the beginning of an extensive roadmap” around it.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note on Monday, that Tesla accepting bitcoin as payment in the future is “a potential game changing move for the use of bitcoin from a transactional perspective,”

According to Ives, the news “formalizes the strategy of Musk and Tesla diving into the deep end of the pool of bitcoin and crypto.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.