Bitcoin Price Drops After Elon Musk Tweets Tesla Will No Longer Accept It as Payment

Bitcoin price fell by 13% after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, tweeted that it will no longer be an acceptable currency to buy Tesla cars.

Prior to tweeting bitcoin was priced at $54,783 and dropped to $47,720 two hours later.

Musk tweeted that his company Tesla will no longer accept Bitcoin as payment due to its environmental impact.

However, Musk said Tesla does not plan to sell the Bitcoin it owns. The CEO also noted the company does plan on using crypto in the future, “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”

Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021

The price of Bitcoin plummeted after Musk tweeted. The price of cryptocurrencies boomed earlier this year when Tesla bought a large amount of Bitcoin and announced they would accept them for payment.

Bitcoin needs a massive amount of power and energy to be “mined,” or the process of creating a new bitcoin. One single Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as a typical US household uses in a month and its annualized costs are equal to the entire energy output of The Netherlands.

Many crypto investors like Mark Cuban criticized Musk’s decision to stop accepting Bitcoin as payment. Many others began to promote other digital currencies. Meanwhile, many crypto critics took to Twitter to gloat about the price drop.

We at https://t.co/VUydpLFzGh will continue to accept BTC/Eth/Doge because we know that replacing Gold as a store of value will help the environment https://t.co/bs7NvnJY8A and https://t.co/ELhbuLOBRV shrinking big bank and coin usage will benefit society and the environment https://t.co/zu08F0STEQ

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) May 12, 2021

Musk’s statement said, “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”

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