With just his tweets, billionaire Elon Musk has shaken the cryptocurrency market this past week, especially with Bitcoin. By announcing the suspension of Bitcoin as a payment method for buying Tesla cars, Musk caused the price of the world’s most famous cryptocurrency to plummet over the past few days.
Recently, the price of Bitcoin plunged again when Musk seemingly agreed with a tweet suggesting that Tesla had sold all of its Bitcoin holdings worth about $1.5 billion that they had claimed to hold at the beginning of this year. This move drove Bitcoin’s price down to $42,000, the lowest level since mid-February.
There wouldn’t be much to discuss if Tesla genuinely cared about the environment as stated in their tweet. However, a Twitter user named “This is Bullish” discovered that while pushing Bitcoin’s price to record lows for several months, Tesla appeared to be quietly profiting from this price manipulation.
The tweet accused Elon Musk of deliberately manipulating Bitcoin’s price for profit.
This conclusion comes from the astonishing coincidence of Musk’s tweet timing with approximately 10,000 Bitcoins (equivalent to $490 million at a price of $49,000) being transferred to Tesla’s wallet address on Coinbase.
Specifically, at around 10:54 AM on May 13 (U.S. time), Musk posted his tweet criticizing the increasing energy consumption of Bitcoin. Just about three minutes later, by 10:57, the tweet quickly caused Bitcoin’s price to drop sharply from $54,000 to $49,000.
Just a few minutes after Musk’s tweet was posted, Bitcoin’s price fell to $49,000 and about 10,000 Bitcoins were transferred to
This was also the time when a transaction of over 10,000 Bitcoins was recorded to be transferred to the wallet address believed to belong to Tesla on Coinbase – this wallet address had previously purchased about 12,000 Bitcoins at a price of over $40,000 on January 2, 2021.
The timing of Bitcoin purchases from the wallet address believed to belong to Tesla.
More interestingly, this Twitter user also received confirmation from Coinbase that, before posting this tweet, the wallet address had sold approximately 10,000 Bitcoins to the market (equivalent to $540 million when Bitcoin was priced at $54,000). However, due to Coinbase’s processing capabilities, the timing of the transaction was recorded slightly later than the posting time of Musk’s tweet.
The chart shows that before Musk’s tweet was posted, over 19,000 Bitcoins were transferred to exchanges for trading.
In other words, “This is Bullish” believes that before Musk posted his tweet, 10,000 Bitcoins were sold by Tesla at a price of $54,000, bringing in about $540 million. A few minutes later, when this tweet caused Bitcoin’s price to drop by 10% to $49,000, the wallet address believed to belong to Tesla quietly bought back those 10,000 Bitcoins for only $490 million.
And with just one tweet from Musk, Tesla made about $50 million in profit while still maintaining their original amount of Bitcoin in their wallet. This aligns with Musk’s promise in the tweet – “Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin“.
However, due to the anonymity of cryptocurrencies, it is very difficult to prove that the wallet address conducting these transactions belongs to Tesla, as there are only indirect pieces of evidence to infer this. Even so, it is clear that the cryptocurrency market is showing unpredictable volatility from the influence of celebrities like Elon Musk, or previously John McAfee.