Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will stop taking Bitcoin as payment for its cars, citing environmental reasons.
Tesla bought and sold a lot of Bitcoin recently.
Tesla only first announced that it would accept Bitcoin back in March, despite the fact that it is estimated to use as much electricity as the Netherlands per year. And it’s a well known fact that its energy inefficiency isn’t particularly aligned with sustainability focused company’s such as Tesla.
“You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin,” Musk tweeted in March.
This was only a month after Tesla disclosed that it had purchased $2 billion in Bitcoin in an SEC filing.
And just two weeks ago Tesla sold roughly 10 per cent of its Bitcoin holdings, to the tune of roughly $US101 million.
And now it is back flipping.
And now it seems like Musk and the company have done quite the backflip on the crypto. Musk has said that until Bitcoin mining becomes more sustainable, Tesla will not use it for transactions or sell it.
Musk took to Twitter to make the new announcement on Thursday.
“Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has worst[sic] emissions of any fuel,” Musk said.
“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”
“Tesla will not be selling any bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.”
“We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”
Since the announcement earlier this morning the price of Bitcoin has dropped dramatically. However, this is not the first time that Musk has directly influenced the price of cryptocurrency.