TESLA has offloaded most of its Bitcoin holdings as the cryptocurrency slumps below $23,000 a token.
Tesla’s super-CEO Elon Musk has been a cryptocurrency advocate and his company’s Bitcoin dumping is a bad sign for a fragile crypto market.
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“As of the end of Q2, we have converted approximately 75% of our Bitcoin purchases into fiat currency,” Tesla’s Q2 2022 shareholder’s deck read.
The deck added that the “Bitcoin impairment” has hurt the company’s profitability over the last calendar year.
Musk said the company needed to cash out part of its investment to make up for production shutdowns in China.
Tesla’s sale of its Bitcoin gives the company a boost of cash worth almost a billion dollars.
Tesla produced and sold more than 250,000 electric vehicles in the second quarter and made almost $17billion in revenue.
The company was continuously affected by shutdowns and the CEO is currently wrestling with Twitter.
Musk said the company did not sell any Dogecoin, the meme-currency that he is being sued for hawking.
When the news of Tesla’s $1.5billion dollar investment into Bitcoin broke in February 2021, the token’s value shot up to over $44,000 and continued to ride the high of Musk and Tesla’s endorsement.
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Tesla accepted payments for vehicles in Bitcoin for a brief moment but ultimately reversed course citing the environmental strain of Bitcoin mining.
In a tweeted statement announcing the cancellation of Bitcoin payments at Tesla, Musk wrote “Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin.”
Reports have painted Tesla’s Bitcoin dump as another example of Musk making a promise he did not keep.
“We are certainly open to increasing our Bitcoin holdings in future, so this should not be taken as some verdict on Bitcoin,” Musk told analysts at MarketWatch.
Musk brushed off the Bitcoin sales in favor of the bigger picture.
“The fundamental goal of Tesla and the reason we’re doing this, which is my primary motivation here, is to have the day of sustainable energy come sooner,” Musk continued in the conference call with MarketWatch.
