On Twitter, Elon Musk Has Mused About Bitcoin
February 08 2021 - 5:21PM
Dow Jones News
By Micah Maidenberg
Elon Musk talks about a lot of things on Twitter, but it was a
series of seemingly random tweets about bitcoin in December that
hinted at the news Monday about Tesla Inc.'s investment in the
cryptocurrency.
Among other bitcoin-related tweets on Dec. 20, the Tesla chief
executive used his Twitter account to post an explicit meme showing
what appears to be a bearded monk with the words "Me trying to live
a normal productive life" pasted over him. The monk is standing
near a woman with the word bitcoin pasted over her.
That graphic elicited a response from Michael Saylor, founder
and chief executive of MicroStrategy Inc., a publicly traded
enterprise-software company that has invested in bitcoin and made
it the company's reserve asset.
"If you want to do your shareholders a $100 billion favor,
convert the [Tesla] balance sheet from [U.S. dollars to bitcoin].
Other firms on the S&P 500 would follow your lead & in time
it would grow to become a $1 trillion favor," Mr. Saylor said in a
tweet.
"Are such large transactions even possible?" Mr. Musk said in
response to him. Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for
comment.
On Monday, Tesla said it bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin and
plans to start accepting the digital currency as payment for its
products soon.
Mr. Saylor said in a tweet Monday, "Congratulations & thank
you to @elonmusk & @Tesla on adding #Bitcoin to their balance
sheet. The entire world will benefit from this leadership." A
spokesman for MicroStrategy confirmed Mr. Saylor's Twitter
account.
Close watchers of Mr. Musk's musings on Twitter, where he has of
late discussed space projects, Tesla vehicles, videogames and other
topics, may not have been surprised by the Silicon Valley car
company's decision to buy bitcoin. In January, Mr. Musk changed his
Twitter biography to read, "#bitcoin." His biography no longer
references it.
Mr. Musk "has a tendency to hint at future developments at Tesla
through his Twitter account [and] recent commentary there has been
geared to bitcoin and other digital currencies," a Robert W. Baird
& Co. analyst said Monday.
Mr. Musk had other things to say about the cryptocurrency on
Dec. 20, beginning with the comment, "Bitcoin is my safe word." He
then added, "Just kidding, who needs a safe word anyway."
To a user who responded to his first tweet by predicting bitcoin
would crash and also would reach $50,000 each in the five years,
Mr. Musk said, "Sounds about right."
Later, he said, "Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money." Fiat
currency is money issued by a central authority, such as a
country's central bank, but isn't linked to an underlying commodity
like gold, according to a definition from a unit of the World
Bank.
On Monday, Mr. Musk again discussed bitcoin further. He
communicated with another Twitter user about the Dogecoin
cryptocurrency and referenced bitcoin's "BTC" symbol: "Doge appears
to be inflationary, but is not meaningfully so (fixed # of coins
per unit time), whereas BTC is arguably deflationary to a fault.
Transaction speed of Doge should ideally be a few orders of
magnitude faster."
He also said Monday that he was ready to move on to other
topics: "Back to work I go ..."
Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 08, 2021 17:06 ET (22:06 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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