You Can Now Pay Elon Musk in Bitcoin

You know Elon. Your mom and dad knows Elon. In the last couple of days, even your grandma knows Elon Musk, after the Tesla/SpaceX CEO bumped Jeff Bezos to become World’s Richest Man. 

Today Musk ended his ambivalence about Bitcoin in response to a tweet written yesterday by author Ben Mezrich, famous for the book The Accidental Billionaires (adapted for film as The Social Network), that said he’s “never turning down getting paid in Bitcoin again.” Musk replied: “me neither.” 

Another major revelation came to light from Musk's Twitter feed. When asked if he actually owns any Dogecoin, he replied ‘No, but maybe one day.” A surprising claim from the man whose Twitter bio once described Musk as the “Former CEO of Dogecoin,” and who on December 20 tweeted, “One word: Doge.”

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The Tesla CEO has been extremely vocal about crypto recently. Before Christmas, he shared a racy meme about Bitcoin, saying that it was his “safe word.” 

A few hours later, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor jumped on the thread to proclaim his absolute faith in Bitcoin. Musk responded demurely, asking if multi-billion dollar Bitcoin transactions were even possible, to which Saylor replied with the ultimate flex: that he had “purchased over $1.3 billion.”

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Michael Saylor has since received massive affirmation in the form of a huge investment (10.9% of MicroStrategy’s shares) by Morgan Stanley. Former Whitehouse Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is another recent high-profile institutional supporter of Bitcoin, and his company SkyBridge’s Bitcoin Fund generated so much interest that 6000 people attempted to join its launch call. 

Much of Bitcoin’s runaway success over the last year has been attributed to the pandemic. At a time when the Fed was frantically printing money and driving the dollar down, Bitcoin rose, attracting big institutional interest along the way. It’s this interest that has further driven the value, to the point where it stands today at an all-time high of $40,000.