Elon Musk tweeted on Wednesday that Teslas can now be bought with Bitcoin, sending the price of the cryptocurrency higher.
Bitcoin rallied from under $54,000 to $56,300 after Musk’s tweet. Currently, only US customers are able to buy the electric cars with Bitcoin. However, Musk said the facility will be available to customers outside the US later in the year.
“Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly,” Musk tweeted. “Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency.”
Last month, Tesla disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had bought $1.5bn worth of Bitcoin and said it was planning to begin accepting it as a form of payment “in the near future”. The company purchased the currency to provide it “with more flexibility to further diversify and maximise returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity”.
Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Markets.com, said the jump in the price of Bitcoin on Wednesday is “not a clear break and not that big a deal given how much Bitcoin moves around at these levels but there was a discernible sustained rally after Musk tweeted”.
Earlier this month, an official filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Musk had changed his job title to “Technoking of Tesla”, while chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn was renamed “Master of Coin”.
Bitcoin surged in January after Musk changed his Twitter bio to just “#bitcoin”.
