Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the electric company will no longer accept bitcoin payments for its vehicles.
In a tweet on Wednesday (May 12, 2021), Elon Musk said that Tesla had suspended bitcoin acceptance for its electric vehicles, citing energy consumption from the bitcoin network.
Tesla first announced that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin in February 2021. The company then hinted that it would start accepting bitcoin as payment for its products.
Later in March, the carmaker announced that U.S. customers could pay to buy Tesla cars with bitcoin.
Tesla’s acceptance of bitcoin provoked negative criticism from environmentalists, who said the move was contrary to Tesla’s apparent stance on managing global emissions.
Following Musk’s tweet, the price of bitcoin plummeted, losing $3.000 in less than 15 minutes. Bitcoin traded at around $55.000 and fell below $52.000 within minutes of Musk’s tweet.
“Tesla will not sell any bitcoin and we intend to use it for trading as soon as mining becomes more sustainable,” Musk wrote, adding: “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of bitcoin trading / energy.”
A recent poll by Elon Musk himself on Twitter about whether Tesla should accept Dogecoin showed that 78% of the 3.9 million respondents supported DOGE payments. But in the end, Dogecoin may not be accepted for payment either, as it uses the same protocol (Power-Of-Work) for mining as bitcoin, which also consumes energy.
