Tesla couldn’t stomach crypto volatility as well as some investors might have hoped.
A quarterly report that Tesla shared today can confirm that the EV maker had sold off 75% of its Bitcoin holdings in the second quarter, adding “$936M of cash” to its balance sheet.
Tesla’s original investment in Bitcoin was worth $1.5 billion, according to an SEC filing from February 2021.
“As of the end of Q2, we have converted approximately 75% of our Bitcoin purchases into fiat currency,” a portion of Tesla’s financial summary reads. “Conversions in Q2 added $963M of cash to our balance sheet.”
Tesla still has $219 million in digital asset exposure, according to coverage by Cointelegraph, which also pointed out that the EV maker took some profits in March last year.
As Cointelegraph reported, the electric vehicle maker sold a portion of its BTC reserves in March 2021, realizing a net profit of $128 million. At the time, CEO Elon Musk explained that the sale, which amounted to 10% of Tesla’s holdings, was to “prove liquidity of Bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash on balance sheet.”
Tesla started accepting Bitcoin for vehicle purchases that same month, but Musk went into reverse gear just 49 days later, removing the leading cryptocurrency as a payment option for environmental reasons.
“I might pump, but I don’t dump,” Musk said at a Bitcoin conference last summer. “I definitely do not believe in getting the price high and selling or anything like that. I would like to see Bitcoin succeed.”
Source: Tesla (via CoinTelegraph)