Nearly all of Tesla's Bitcoin is on the move after two years of inactivity.
Wallets associated with Elon Musk's electric car company, as labeled by Arkham Intelligence, moved approximately $765 million worth of Bitcoin—all but about $6 worth—to unknown wallets on Tuesday. The wallets appear to be new and are not known to be associated with crypto exchanges, so there's no immediate suggestion that Tesla is planning to sell the Bitcoin.
Decrypt reached out to Tesla for comment and confirmation but did not receive an immediate response.
Tesla first disclosed in 2020 that it had obtained $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, but didn't hold that amount for long. The firm sold about 10% of the stash in Q1 2021, and then sold about 75% of the remaining holdings in July 2022 with the price down sharply from what had then been an all-time high price of about $69,000 set in November 2021. Bitcoin was only valued at around $24,000 at the time of that sale.
The 10 Public Companies With the Biggest Bitcoin Portfolios
For many years, the idea that publicly traded corporations might buy Bitcoin for their reserves was considered laughable. The top cryptocurrency was considered too volatile, too fringe to be embraced by any serious business. That taboo has been well and truly broken, with a number of major institutional investors buying up Bitcoin in recent years. The floodgates first opened when cloud software company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) bought $425 million worth of Bitcoin in August and September...
However, the firm continued to hold the remaining share, which has appreciated in value substantially since then given Bitcoin's current price of about $66,500.
Tesla has had a mixed relationship with Bitcoin beyond the buying and selling. In 2021, Tesla said that it would accept Bitcoin payments for cars, but then halted the move two months later, with Musk citing the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.
Musk, an outspoken fan of meme coin Dogecoin, said in 2021 that the firm would consider resuming Bitcoin payments once a majority of Bitcoin mining is powered by green energy. The firm has yet to do so.
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication with additional details.
