Elon Musk says Tesla will stop accepting Bitcoin to buy cars after company bought $1.5BILLION in cryptocurrency
TESLA will no longer accept Bitcoin to purchase its cars, Elon Musk said on Wednesday, citing the harmful effects to the environment that comes with mining for cryptocurrency.
Immediately after making the announcement, both and share prices dropped considerably.
"Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin," Musk . "We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel."
"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,” he continued.
"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," Musk ended.
Tesla only began accepting Bitcoin 49 days ago in late March.
After Musk's tweet on Wednesday, Bitcoin stock fell by almost $2,000, falling from $54,700 to roughly $52,600.
Tesla's shares also went down by almost one percent after the after-trading-hours tweet.
and other cryptos, like Dogecoin.
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Musk's final sentence perked some ears as the Tesla CEO recently did a Twitter poll asking his almost 54million Twitter followers if the car company should accept Dogecoin as a payment option.
"I do at this point think Bitcoin is a good thing, and I am a supporter of Bitcoin," he said. "I think Bitcoin is really on the verge of getting broad acceptance by conventional finance people."
In a February 2021 , he doubled down on the sentiment, saying, "Having some Bitcoin, which is simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash, is adventurous enough for an S&P500 company."