Musk Sells Tesla Shares Worth $3.58 Billion, Will He Buy Bitcoin?
For the fourth time this year, Elon Musk has sold Tesla shares for billions. The crypto community is wondering if and what implications this could have on his Bitcoin and Dogecoin holdings, or even Tesla’s BTC holdings.
Musk sold $3.58 billion worth of stock from Monday to Wednesday, a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission reveals. What Musk plans to use the money for is currently unclear. Naturally, the crypto community is speculating about what will happen to the cash. Since Musk announced the now-completed acquisition of Twitter in April 2022, the entrepreneur has parted with $23 billion worth of Tesla stock.
The funds from previous Tesla stock sales likely went toward the Twitter acquisition, which ended up costing Musk $44 billion. This expensive takeover has not been rosy for the billionaire either. In recent weeks, the Tesla boss has faced harsh criticism from the mainstream media. Some large companies stopped advertising on Twitter.
Because of this, there has been a sharp loss of income, Musk admitted. But Tesla’s share value has also fallen by more than half since April. Many investors fear that Musk will become so absorbed in Twitter that he will lose focus on Tesla.
“It doesn’t inspire confidence in the company and says a lot about where his attention is,” said Tony Sycamore, an analyst at brokerage IG Markets.
Tesla stock’s performance is surprisingly similar to Bitcoin’s. While Tesla stock has lost -58.13% year-to-date, BTC price has fallen -60.29% YTD.
Will Elon Musk buy Bitcoin or Dogecoin?
Although many bitcoin investors see the current situation as a good opportunity to buy Bitcoin cheap, it is not known whether Elon Musk or Tesla share this opinion.
Currently, there is no BTC on-chain data to suggest such an action. Musk using his Tesla shares to buy Dogecoin also seems highly unlikely. Otherwise, there probably needs to be a massive pump of the DOGE price. Whether Tesla will buy the BTC dip will not be known until the Q4 earnings report, which is due on January 25, 2023. Tesla has already sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings.
Its remaining holdings are currently estimated at 10,500 BTC. As the electric car maker revealed in its latest earnings report, the company neither sold its BTC holdings nor bought additional Bitcoin in the third quarter of 2022.
Musk said in a second-quarter earnings conference call that the latest selloff of Tesla’s BTC stash happened because of the uncertainty of COVID blocks in China. Notably, he noted that Tesla is open to increasing its BTC exposure in the future.
At press time, the BTC price stood at $17,724 and was rejected at key resistance at $18,220.
