Tesla, the electric car company owned by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk, transferred all of its Bitcoin to unknown wallets in a series of transactions last week. This mass movement led to speculations about a potential market dump — spurring anxiety among crypto investors.
However, analytics firm Arkham Intelligence said on Tuesday that
Tesla still owns 11,509 Bitcoins — currently worth over $776.9 million.
Tesla Has Not Sold Its $777M In BTC
Arkham posted a statement on X to clarify why Tesla, one of the largest publicly traded companies to have invested in Bitcoin, may have emptied its wallets last week.
According to Arkham, the Bitcoin stash had not been moved for two years before October 15 — which led some to speculate that Tesla might be preparing to sell Bitcoin. The coins were moved to seven new wallet addresses believed to be controlled by the EV maker.
“We believe that the Tesla wallet movements that we reported on last week were wallet rotations with the Bitcoin still owned by Tesla,” Arkham said. “Tesla moved their entire balance of 11,509 BTC ($776.9 million) to new wallets.”
The crypto data firm noted that each wallet received test transactions, and all but one currently holds a round number of BTC, implying strategic wallet rotations rather than outright selling.
Although it’s unclear why Tesla moved its Bitcoin cache, Arkham revealed that some observers speculate the BTC may have been transferred to a crypto custodian, possibly allowing the electric car manufacturer to secure a loan against Bitcoin. Notably, Tesla executives may reveal their plan with its Bitcoin reserves during the firm’s third-quarter earnings call scheduled for today (Oct. 23).
The Sixth Anniversary Of Elon Musk’s First Public Endorsement Of Bitcoin
It bears mentioning that yesterday (Oct. 22) marked six years since Musk asked his Twitter followers whether they would want to buy some Bitcoin.
At the time, Bitcoin was valued at around $6,400. BTC’s value has since skyrocketed by nearly 1,000%. The premier crypto was trading for $66,488 as of press time, according to CoinGecko data.
Musk’s Tesla, of course, went on to buy $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in February 2021 and at some point owned as much as $2.5 billion worth, per Arkham data. However, the firm sold 75% of its holdings in early 2022 — at a loss. Back then, Musk said he had concerns over the impact of Bitcoin mining on the environment, and the company suspended Bitcoin payments for its EV cars as a result.
While some of Musk’s companies — including Tesla and SpaceX — hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, it is unclear what Musk’s current stance is when it comes to the alpha crypto. In July, Musk said he believed “there’s some merit in BTC and maybe other cryptocurrencies,” but that his soft spot was for the original meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE).
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