Elon Musk’s Tesla, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said it was holding bitcoin worth $1.99 billion as of December 2021 and had purchased an aggregate of $1.5 billion in bitcoin during the first quarter of 2021. According to the data from the bitcoin knowledge portal buybitcoinworldwide.com, Tesla is currently the second-largest public holder of bitcoin (42,902 BTC) while MicroStrategy holds more bitcoin ( 125,051 BTC worth nearly $5.5 billion) than any other publicly-traded company on Earth.
“We believe in the long-term potential of digital assets both as an investment and also as a liquid alternative to cash,” Tesla said in its filing on Monday. The company added that it had briefly accepted bitcoin as a payment for sales of “certain of our products in specified regions.”
In February last year, Tesla had disclosed a $1.5 billion worth purchase of Bitcoin and said the company would soon start accepting Bitcoin from buyers of its cars as payment. However, in May, Musk tweeted that the company has suspended the purchase of vehicles using Bitcoin on the back of alleged environmental concerns due to bitcoin mining.
Also read: Bitcoin recovers nearly 30% after crashing 50% in January from peak in November last year
According to the SEC filing, Tesla had also recorded $101 million of impairment losses from its investment in bitcoin last year due to “changes in bitcoin value”. The cryptocurrency had hit an all-time high price of $67,566 in November last year but ended the year with a 31 per cent price drop to $46,306 as of December 31, 2021, data from CoinMarketCap showed. However, the company also declared gains of $128 million on the sale of a part of its Bitcoin holdings in March 2021, according to the filing.
“Such gains are presented net of impairment losses in Restructuring and other in the consolidated statement of operations. As of December 31, 2021, the carrying value of our digital assets held was $1.26 billion, which reflects cumulative impairments of $101 million,” the company noted. Hence, the annual gains for Tesla stood at $27 million in crypto bitcoin transactions.
Among other top public enterprises with bitcoin ownership included Galaxy Digital Holdings ($718 million worth BTC), Voyager Digital ($537 million), Marathon Digital Holdings ($356 million), Square ($351 million), and more.
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