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Comment by kerblang | Hacker News Reader

So apparently in february tesla bought 1.5 billion in bitcoin as part of a plan to accept payments, then announced today they won't accept those payments and took a nasty hit on the value of that bitcoin because of it.

Do I just interpret this at face value as capricious decision-making?

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Tesla bought BTC when it was around $36k IIRC, so even with the value decrease yesterday-today, they're still up significantly.

Probably, tesla already sold all of crypto holdings, may be they will buy it latter at around 36k, again.

No, they sold 10% of their holdings to verify liquidity. [1]

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-tesla-sold-bitcoin-...

They also seemed to have taken some profits. Tesla's Q1 reports a profit of $101 million from Bitcoin sales.

Which he stated was done to prove liquidity.

Stated intention is almost meaningless.

Hard to take that at face value when Tesla has historically struggled to make profits. If you were worried about liquidity, you wouldn't put that much capital at risk.

Also, liquidity today doesn't say anything about liquidity in a year's time.

Tesla has made profits continually (even during the pandemic) for more then 2 years.

They stated clearly that putting less then 10% of their cash assets into something that was highly liquid, but had also chance at gaining value was preferable to cash.

Specially because they can make it liquid difference currencies very fast.

It's a risky move regardless of the rationale, because a pump without a dump is arguably lawful.

Why would they buy bitcoin because they are planning to accept it from customers, which would increase their position?

Announcing the acceptance was probably just advertising for the pump and dump they did.

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