Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla has filed its first quarter report for 2021 which values the firm’s Bitcoin holdings at over $2bln.
Tesla filed its latest quarterly report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which outlines the company’s financial statements. Included in the statements is Tesla’s Bitcoin holdings, a new feature on its balance sheets after the firm became one of the biggest mainstream institutions to move a significant portion of its capital into BTC.
The filing valued Tesla’s Bitcoin holdings at $2.48 billion as of March 31, while the firm also noted a net gain of $101 million on its digital asset holdings. Tesla recorded $128mln in profit from the sale of about 10 percent of its total BTC holdings, while it also accounted for a $27 million loss after calculating impairment losses on some of the BTC it had recently due to price depreciation.
Musk explains sudden BTC sale
Tesla’s decision to begin investing some of its non-working capital in Bitcoin is widely understood to have been influenced by business intelligence firm MicroStrategy. The latter’s CEO Michael Saylor is a major Bitcoin proponent and drove MicroStrategy’s industry-leading move to adopt Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset midway through 2020.
Saylor famously offered to share his ‘Bitcoin Playbook’ with Tesla CEO Elon Musk late last year, and a few months later the electric vehicle manufacturer revealed that it had followed suit and bought a sizable portion of BTC.
Musk has also been a strong supporter of the fundamentals behind Bitcoin’s investment case in recent months. Considering this, news that Tesla had sold 10 percent of its BTC holdings earlier this week raised some eyebrows, given that the firm had gone as far as launching a BTC payment option for its vehicles and stated clearly that it would hold the BTC gained from those sales.
The Tesla CEO gave a fairly short explanation of the reasoning behind Tesla’s 10 percent BTC sale, after Barstool Sports founder and media personality Dave Portnoy called Musk out on Twitter for seemingly backing out on those statements.
Musk hit back at Portnoy’s suggestion that he’d bought BTC and used his influence to ‘pump’ the price before selling a portion of Tesla’s holdings:
“No, you do not. I have not sold any of my Bitcoin. Tesla sold 10% of its holdings essentially to prove liquidity of Bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash on balance sheet,” Musk replied to Portnoy’s Tweet.
