Tesla Has Already Profited More From $1.5 Billion Bitcoin Buy Than 2020 Car Sales: Wedbush

Elon Musk’s electric car company is poised to profit more from its Bitcoin investment made in January than from all of its car sales in the entirety of 2020, according to a note from U.S. research firm Wedbush Securities.

Tesla disclosed earlier this month that it bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in January. Following Tesla’s disclosure, Bitcoin’s price shot up like one of the rockets from Musk’s other venture, SpaceX. Moments after the news broke, Bitcoin’s price jumped by 8.5%.

And Bitcoin has kept rising: 12 days later, Bitcoin has broken $57,000, securing a market cap just north of $1 trillion.

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Wedbush analysts Dan Ives and Strecker Backe estimate Tesla has already seen $1 billion of profit from its Bitcoin investment; compare that to the $721 million in profit Tesla reported for its fiscal year 2020. (This assumes Tesla hasn't yet sold any of the Bitcoin it bought in January.)

Musk has helped the price of Bitcoin by tweeting about it to his 47.5 million followers. When he changed his Twitter bio to "#Bitcoin#", the price of Bitcoin rose by 13% within an hour. Musk has defended the coin against critics, too. When gold bug and Bitcoin critic, Peter Schiff, who runs Euro Pacific Bank, tweeted that gold was superior to crypto, Musk disagreed, tweeting, "An email saying you have gold is not the same as having gold. You might as well have crypto."

Wedbush calls the Bitcoin investment a "side show for Tesla" but also thinks it could “have a ripple impact” for public companies over the next year and a half. 

Even so, the firm predicts less than 5% of public companies will copy Tesla's Bitcoin investment “until more regulatory goal posts are put in place around the crypto market.” 

Wedbush remains optimistic that crypto “will have a seismic impact for blockchain, payments, banks, and semis in the years to come.”