Elon Musk’s company invested $1.5 billion in crypto last year
Tesla has reported that the fair market value of its Bitcoin holdings as of December 31 was $1.99 billion. The figure was revealed on Monday in Tesla’s annual filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In the filing, the company reports that, in the year ending December 31, 2021, it recorded approximately $101 million of impairment losses resulting from changes to the value of Bitcoin, and gains of $128 million on certain sales of Bitcoin. The company accepted the cryptocurrency for payment for its products for several months in 2021.
Tesla invested an aggregate $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2021, according to the previous filing. The filing doesn’t disclose the date of the purchase but, during that period, the price of the digital currency fluctuated between $29,405 in early January and $61,177 in mid-March. On December 31, 2021 the price of Bitcoin fluctuated between $45,700 and $48,500. According to a database from the crypto analytics firm CoinGecko, Tesla owns 48,000 Bitcoin.
Tesla is the second-biggest holder of Bitcoin in the corporate world, with the largest being the Virginia-based business intelligence software maker MicroStrategy, which owns more than 121,000 Bitcoin worth more than $5 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has influenced the value of Bitcoin on numerous occasions by posting messages on Twitter. In January last year, he added #bitcoin to his Twitter bio, which helped push the token’s price up by as much as 20%. He also said he believed the token would gain ‘broad acceptance’ in finance.
Later, however, he did a U-turn on the cryptocurrency, voicing concerns about its energy usage and cost to the environment. In May last year, he announced that Tesla would stop accepting Bitcoin as payment for its products because of concerns about “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.”
