The crypto wallets of Elon Musk’s companies have been located, according to blockchain analytics company Arkham Intelligence. Arkham cross-referenced financial reports with on-chain activity to locate the massive wallets.
Tesla Inc. and SpaceX have a combined total of around 19,800 Bitcoins, according to Arkham. The stash is divided across many wallets: Tesla holds around 11,500 BTC across 68 addresses, while SpaceX holds around 8,300 tokens across 28 wallets.
The tokens are worth over $1.4 billion after Bitcoin reached new all-time highs and crossed above the $72,000 level.
This stash presents a major profit for the companies. SpaceX is at $276 million in profits on the investment, while Tesla has nearly $500 million in gains. While these amounts are small in comparison to the companies’ profits from operations, they are sizable when compared to other investments.
Tesla began buying Bitcoin in February 2021, making an unprecedented investment of $1.5 billion in the token. This was a contributing factor to the Bitcoin rally seen less than a month later, where Bitcoin set all-time highs.
While Tesla has seen huge returns on its Bitcoin investment, it made some untimely sales. For example, it sold nearly 30,000 Bitcoins in June 2022, as the company needed cash and Musk wanted to show Bitcoin’s ability to handle large transactions. Bitcoin was trading for around $25,000 at the time of the sale, well below current prices.
Conversely, it sold around 10% of its total holdings after Bitcoin reached new all-time highs of over $60,000 in March 2021. The sale of 4,320 Bitcoins generated over $250 million in cash.
Musk and Tesla began accepting Bitcoin in early 2021, around the same time they made the initial investment of $1.5 billion. However, in May 2021, Musk discontinued purchases of Tesla vehicles with Bitcoin.
“Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel. Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”
So, Musk is a strong believer in crypto, but he does not see a way to use tokens that use lots of power and are potentially damaging to the environment. Bitcoin is proof-of-work (PoW), meaning that it allows network participants to use computing power to compete for the ability to process transactions. This results in huge amounts of energy consumption.
While Musk may not may not be using Bitcoin in a transactional way, it has certainly paid off as an investment.