the bet of Elon Musk for Bitcoin it has come out face to Tesla. The maker of electric vehicles directed by the tycoon registered in 2022 net losses of 140 million dollars in his investment for those cryptocurrencies.
According to a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the impairment of the valor from those digital assets led the company to suffer a gross loss of $204 million. However, he managed to convert part of his investments to fiat currency such as the dollar, with which he obtained a profit of 64 million.
During the first quarter of 2021, Musk decided to bet on Bitcoin, whose value was then strong. Tesla invested 1.5 billion dollars in the most trusted cryptocurrency and announced that it would start accepting payments with that digital currency in USA. Shortly after, in May, the second richest man in the world changed his mind and assured that he would not accept payments in Bitcoin until it was guaranteed that the process to generate these cryptocurrencies was more sustainable and use around 50% clean energy.
Musk and Tesla are currently on trial for a possible stock fraud. The company’s investors accuse its director of having manipulated the market and the valuation of its shares with a series of tweets in 2018 in which he assured that he would take Tesla private.
crypto sinking
In that report, Tesla acknowledges that instability and volatility of those assets may have “negatively affected our profitability.” After becoming popular as an investment mechanism in 2021, the cryptocurrency market experienced a black 2022. The succession of business scandals, scams and bankruptcies made some 2 trillion dollars disappear from a sector in crisis. The value of Bitcoin fell more than 60%.
Tesla reportedly sold approximately 75% of its Bitcoin investments in the second quarter of 2022. An operation with which Musk not only tried to stop the bleeding on his companies from the fall in value, but also carried out to get money with which to buy Twitter.
Still, Tesla has closed out a brilliant 2022. The firm earned 12,556 million dollars in the last 12 months, 167% more than in 2021, results that far exceed investor expectations.