Today — Feb. 8 — marks one year since Tesla hit headlines globally by announcing that it was investing in Bitcoin — news that caused interest in the cryptocurrency to surge further.
Tesla made a healthy profit on its Bitcoin in 2021, but still suffered an impairment loss of $101 million during the year.
In a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the electric vehicle manufacturer revealed that the value of its BTC had surged to $1.99 billion by Dec. 31.
That's not bad considering Tesla had initially bought Bitcoin worth $1.5 billion at the start of the year — later selling 10% in order to test the market's liquidity.
Some quick math tells us that Tesla's balance sheet might look a little worse for wear after a trying start to 2022 for the crypto markets.
BTC was trading at $46,306 on New Year's Eve, but had slumped to $42,835 on Monday — down 7.49%. As a result, rough estimates would suggest Tesla's crypto is now worth $1.84 billion.
Still, this is a marked improvement on what the BTC would have been when prices hit lows of $33,000 toward the end of January. Given how it's believed Tesla initially bought the Bitcoin for $34,000, the publicly listed firm would have ended up nursing a loss.
The rest of the SEC filing covered things we already know, with Tesla reaffirming that it "believes in the long-term potential of digital assets both as an investment and also as a liquid alternative to cash."
But despite this enthusiastic tone, the company stressed that it "may decrease our holdings of digital assets at any time based on the needs of the business and on our view of market and environmental conditions."
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Any More Crypto Plans?
Today — Feb. 8 — marks one year since Tesla hit headlines globally by announcing that it was investing in Bitcoin — news that caused interest in the cryptocurrency to surge further.
But it's been a year full of drama. Elon Musk had initially said that Tesla would accept BTC as a payment method for its cars, but performed a U-turn amid concerns about the environmental impact of its blockchain.
Musk had said support for BTC payments would be reinstated once it could be proven that at least 50% of the energy used by the network comes from renewable sources. Although some crypto enthusiasts argue this threshold has already been met, this is difficult to verify.
As a small consolation prize, Tesla has started accepting Dogecoin for some of its merchandise.
Despite this, DOGE remains in managed decline — currently trading at $0.1575. That's a long way off the all-time highs of $0.7376 set in May 2021, when manis surrounding the memecoin had peaked.
Tesla had been expected to trigger a tidal wave of institutional adoption into Bitcoin, but few big names on the stock market have followed suit by adding the cryptocurrency to their balance sheets.
Over on Wall Street, TSLA has had a rather torrid start to 2022 — much like Bitcoin. The stock has fallen by 24% over the past five weeks, and was trading at $907 by Monday's close.
