"Elon is bad for crypto"
A welcome return to form on Instagram for Kelly Slater this weekend when he put Elon Musk, creator of Space X, Tesla, PayPal etc, to the sword for suggesting, vaguely, that Tesla might sell its store of Bitcoin, a decision that would probs send the price of the crypto-buck spiralling downward.
See, in Feb, Tesla announced it had bought a bill-and-a-half of Bitcoin and said it would accept Bitcoin as payment for its electric cars. Price went up etc.
Then, in May, Musk said they weren’t gonna take Bitcoin for cars ’cause the currency’s “insane” energy use was “hurting the planet.”
Price went down.
From Kelly’s IG story,
“Elon Musk and Tesla Motors proudly bought $1.5B worth of Bitcoin for around $34K in Feb. Elon comes out this week and says BTC mining is bad for the environment and they dump their bitcoin for an estimated $804M in profits (but he’s still pushing dogecoin, a useless shit coin).
“So a guy who owns an energy company doesn’t understand this stuff before he buys it? Has no problem taking the profits. Does he have an issue with kids mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to build batteries? He could probably address and potentially help solve the real energy issues (68 per cent of the energy produced in the US, for instance, is wasted … seems like a bigger issue to me which would solve any BTC problem).
“I think Elon’s board and backers hate crypto and what it’s doing for the average investor and pressured him to put out a statement which they knew would inevitably tank bitcoin. I hope the SEC is taking a good look at this (and all of them who might be buying the dip today and this week in their private accounts). Interesting times. But Elon is bad for crypto.”
No reply from Musk, as we went to press.