ELON STRANGE TRIP
Prophetic Reddit prankster ‘was on acid’
A German prankster claims that he was behind a mysterious Reddit post last month that appeared to anticipate Tesla’s blockbuster bitcoin buy this week — and that he was on LSD when he did it, The Post has learned.
Tesla stunned Wall Street on Monday when it revealed it had acquired $1.5 billion in bitcoin to “further diversify and maximize returns” for the cash on its balance sheet. Tesla said it also plans to start accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its electric cars.
Not long after the surprise announcement, attention turned to a Jan. 2 post from a Reddit user named “TSLAinsider” who claimed to have a hot tip about Tesla’s move into the cryptocurrency market.
“You heard it here first – our Company just bought 800 Million worth of Bitcoin,” the 5-week-old post read.
The user, claiming he was “a software dev working at R&D at Tesla in California,” added that the Elon Musk-led company had bought 24,701 bitcoin at an average price of $33,142 “over the past 72 hours.”
The post looked like such a prescient prediction of Tesla’s investment in the cryptocurrency that financial news outlets including Reuters and Bloomberg picked it up this week.
But in an interview with The Post, Hendrik, the 24-year-old political-science student behind the TSLAinsider account, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he made the post while he was high on the potent hallucinogen over the holiday season.
“If you want to know the truth: I am a young German guy and I was on Acid while I did this post in the last month,” the user told The Post in an e-mail on Tuesday. “I had this afflatus that Elon is going to buy bitcoin, so I created this troll post. And now all the newspapers around the globe are writing about it, its kinda funny and scary to be honest.”
Hendrik said he got an intuition that Tesla would invest in Bitcoin after seeing a December Twitter exchange between Musk and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, whose business-intelligence firm bought more than $1 billion worth of the digital currency last year.
“Me and my girlfriend, we took acid, and I saw the conversation between Michael Saylor and Elon Musk on Twitter, and I was like, yeah, why shouldn’t he buy into Bitcoin?” Hendrik told The Post in a Tuesday Zoom interview from Germany. “He’s crazy and he has a lot of money, so why not?”
Hendrik provided The Post with a screenshot showing himself logged into the TSLAinsider Reddit account, which triumphantly posted, “I TOLD YOU SO,” after Tesla’s market-moving Monday announcement.
His post — which received no comments on Reddit’s bitcoin-focused forum — was dubious enough that moderators of the message board dedicated to Tesla stock removed it, according to Hendrik.
It also didn’t quite line up with Tesla’s Monday regulatory filing, which said the company bought Bitcoin after changing its investment policy in January. The purchases spanning 72 hours would have had to start during the final days of December.