Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, will accept as payment soon
Tesla has invested around $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and said it plans to begin accepting the digital currency as payment for it high-end vehicles soon. The price of Bitcoin soared 15% to above $43,000 Monday morning.
The California-based electric car maker headed by Elon Musk revealed the new strategy in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying its investment in digital currency and other “alternative reserve assets” may grow.
Bitcoin rose to $43,863 and briefly hit a new alltime high. Shares of Tesla moved higher as well.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report last month Tesla said it had cash and cash equivalents of $19.4 billion.
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said the move gives Tesla “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on its cash.”
Palo Alto-based Tesla reported its first annual net profit in 2020, and its stock soared to make it the world’s most valuable automaker. Tesla joined the S&P 500 late last year and is currently valued at more than $820 billion.
It’s been a wild ride for Bitcoin since it made its Wall Street debut in December 2017. Major futures exchanges rolled out bitcoin futures, pushing it to roughly $19,300, a then-unheard of price for the currency. It evaporated quickly in 2018, and by December of that year Bitcoin was worth less than $4,000 a coin.
More recently bitcoin
rallied from below $11,000 in October and crossed $40,000 for the first time in its history.
While in the last two years companies have embraced the technology that underlies digital currencies like Bitcoin, a concept known as the blockchain, the actual uses for Bitcoin have not really changed since its rally three years ago. It’s still largely used by those distrustful of the banking system, criminals seeking to launder money, and for the most part, as a store of value.
But the dominoes could be falling if major companies follow Tesla’s lead and begin accepting the digital currency as payment.
Ives said “this move could put more momentum into shares of Tesla as more investors start to value the company’s bitcoin/crypto exposure as part of the overall valuation.
Telsa shares rose 2% to $869 in morning trading.
Critics say Tesla’s sales and profits are puny compared with established automakers such as Toyota and General Motors, and its huge valuation is not justified by financial fundamentals.
I never liked the phrase “the new normal,” which became popular after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was a too-easy, high drama cliché, but worse than that, it implied that we would become accustomed to terrorism as a way of life. That was and always will be unacceptable.
And this is why this week’s impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump is so important, and why last week’s House vote to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of her committee assignments -- with, it should never be forgotten, 11 Republican votes -- sent an invaluable message.
Although we can welcome President Biden’s desire to look forward rather than backward, our nation, and the Republican Party in particular, have not fully come to terms with what the violent attack on our Capitol and the effort to overturn the result of a free election mean for our democracy. Trumpism and its close cousins in Greene-ism, QAnonism, white supremacy and violent extremism cannot become “the new normal” in our politics.
Yet we have “moved on” far too quickly. All 147 Republicans who, against all evidence, cast at least one vote to reject legitimate election returns should at some point be called upon to issue a formal recantation of the falsehoods on which their votes were based.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) treats advocates of “a bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as another wing of the Republican Party. Yes, the GOP includes supply-siders, social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and now would-be assassins who believe that Jewish lasers start forest fires. Talk about broadening the base!
McCarthy isn’t even a competent opportunist. He condemned QAnon last summer when it seemed politically convenient to do so, but turned around last week and said: “I don’t even know what it is.”
Memo to McCarthy: You have heard of Google, haven’t you? Everything you said before is readily available.
White extremism is, alas, nothing new. After Barack Obama’s election, an Associated Press story on Nov. 15, 2008 began: “Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting ‘Assassinate Obama.’ Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.” The incidents “are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.”
Trump exploited racist feelings against Obama before he ran for president. He made clear to the right-wing radicals after he won that they had a friend in the White House, and they became key to his survival strategy after he lost to Biden.
And then he moved to replace democracy with mobocracy, gathering a throng in Washington and inciting it to march to the Capitol and sack it. Five people died, including a Capitol police officer, and the crowd threatened other elected officials, including Trump’s own Vice President.
This is the outrage that the House impeachment managers will describe in detail this week. The nation, and especially the Republican Party, must come to terms with it.
In particular, the managers will show video interviews of members of the rampaging horde making clear that they were doing what they were doing because Trump asked them to. And they will show that Trump himself welcomed the violence.
Thus one of the most telling passages in the House impeachment managers brief:
“In fact, when Congressional leaders begged President Trump to send help, or to urge his supporters to stand down, he instead renewed his attacks on the Vice President and focused on lobbying Senators to challenge the election results. Only hours after his mob first breached the Capitol did President Trump release a video statement calling for peace and even then, he told the insurrectionists (who were at that very moment rampaging through the Capitol) ‘we love you’ and ‘you’re very special.’” Very special indeed. Enough Republican Senators seem ready to hide behind the claim (easily contested though historical examples) that a president can’t be impeached when he’s out of office. So a conviction vote may fall short of the required two-thirds majority.
They should think again. We really cannot have the national “unity” everyone claims to yearn for unless the president’s own party acknowledges that these were high crimes and misdemeanors of a fundamental sort. They involved an attack on democracy itself through force and violence at the beckoning of a leader who sought to corrupt not only our political process but also our self-understanding as a nation of equals.
The impeachment managers will be insisting that this can never be our “new normal.” Here’s wishing them Godspeed in their work.