Elon Musk is mostly known for Tesla cars and SpaceX, but his roots are in the financial sector as one of the early founders of Paypal. His knowledge of the markets is deeper than you may think.
The purpose for mentioning all of this is to make you understand that Elon is not ignorant to the fact that he is manipulating the cryptocurrency market with his social media posts. Yes, social media market manipulation is fairly new in the grand scheme of things but it’s impact on the way the market moves has changed the way people decide which stocks or crypto’s to buy, for the foreseeable future.
On this occasion, May 11th, 2021 Elon decides to Tweet that Tesla will no longer be accepting Bitcoin for payment of Tesla vehicles. Of course, Tesla is not the first or the last company that decided to accept Bitcoin and then change its mind. But, as someone who has done so much to garner the trust of the crypto community by investing in Bitcoin and openly promoting Dogecoin. It just seems a little disingenuous that he would suddenly change his mind, citing that Bitcoin uses fossil fuels as part of its mining process.
The debate about how much energy Bitcoin consumes has been had time and time again only to be laid to rest by the fact that of the 160,000 TWh of electricity that the world produces over 50,000TWhs is wasted. Of the 50,000 TWh considered wasted Bitcoin consumes 150 TWh. It is clear that Bitcoin's power consumption is very small.
If Bitcoin’s power consumption is so small relative to how much energy is wasted, then why would Elon Musk base his decision on that statistic? The answer is actually pretty simple, money. Tesla receives $518 million in Carbon Emission Credits for producing carbon-negative vehicles. Tesla could risk losing money if the transactional process it uses to receive payments adds to its carbon output or the public perceives them to associated with dirty energy.
