BTC Crashes After Elon Musk Hints He May Parting with His Crypto Stash
There comes a time when people need to learn to stop talking and just listen. It looks like that time has come for Elon Musk. Either he is oblivious to his power within the crypto community, or he likes to make waves as a hobby, but his latest discussion regarding selling his bitcoin stash has delivered a hard blow to the world’s number one digital currency by market cap.
Elon Musk May Cash Out of Crypto
Musk – the South African entrepreneur behind billion-dollar companies such as Tesla and SpaceX – caused a huge rift in the digital world not too long ago when he announced that his electric car company had rescinded its decision to accept bitcoin payments. The currency fell from its mid-$50,000 range to about $49,000 as a result, and many traders and analysts alike took the news quite hard.
However, bitcoin has now dropped another $6,000 to just over $43,000 at press time following a Twitter conversation involving Musk in which the CEO hinted that he would potentially be selling all his bitcoins in the coming future. While he did not actually say this was a done deal, his response to someone else’s message is causing many people to think that it is.
A Twitter user going by the name @CryptoWhale posted the following tweet:
Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their holdings. With the amount of hate @elonmusk is getting, I would not blame him.
Musk, naturally, took notice of this tweet and responded with the following word:
Indeed.
From this, people are assuming that Musk either has or is considering selling all his bitcoins, and this appears to be causing panic within the space. Musk has clearly shown himself to be a man of great power within the crypto space, and his words are wreaking havoc on the bitcoin price.
Following the tweet session between himself and @CryptoWhale, the price of bitcoin fell to just under $44,000. The world’s biggest and most popular cryptocurrency by market cap has fallen by roughly $20,000 from last month’s high of nearly $64,000.
Musk has long been a crypto fan, though his words suggest he has switched gears in recent weeks. A separate tweet responding to various criticism on social media saw him say:
Hey cryptocurrency ‘experts,’ ever heard of PayPal? It is possible… maybe… that I know more than you realize about how money works.
Many Aren’t Too Pleased
Musk reportedly helped build PayPal from the ground up. Regardless of his defensive stance, many are not happy when it comes to his continued influence on digital markets, with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures commenting:
He is playing games. It is hard to take anyone who does that seriously. I have lost enormous respect for him over the last year because of it.
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