According to documents released by Tesla, an electric car manufacturer, Elon Musk’s Tesla still holds $218M in Bitcoin and remains unchanged from the second quarter of 2022. Tesla released these documents ahead of its third-quarter investor relations call.
On the 19th of October, Tesla released a report to the public in which it said that the company still holds $218 million in Bitcoin. However, in July, Tesla announced that it sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings, whose worth was around $936 million at the time. But at the end of June, Tesla released a report in which it said that it holds $222 million worth of digital assets on its balance sheet.
In the Q2 investor call, Elon, Tesla’s CEO, indicated that their company sold its Bitcoin to free up cash because COVID lockdowns continue in China. Elon explained that It was important for them to maximize their cash position, given the uncertainty of COVID lockdowns in China.
Despite selling a large amount of Bitcoin, Tesla remains one of the largest Bitcoin holders by a publicly traded company. MicroStrategy stands first with around 130,000 BTC, and Galaxy Digital Holdings stands second with 16,400 BTC. MicroStrategy holds a Bitcoin value of around $2.48 billion, while Galaxy Digital holds a Bitcoin value of $313 million.
However, Musk’s plan to buy Twitter did not seem to have changed the company’s stance on crypto. In September, some leaked messages showed that Musk was having discussions with various tech entrepreneurs about the potential future of the popular social media platform. His discussions were with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Block Inc.’s Jack Dorsey.
In those discussions, there was an idea floated to add a payment option using Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. This idea was to have users pay a tiny amount to register a message on-chain. This idea said that the majority of spam and bots would be cut by requiring 0.1 Doge to post or repost comments.