News

Elon Musk breaks up with bitcoin? See Cryptic tweet

Published

4 years ago

June 4, 2021

Crypto bull Elon Musk on Thursday evening issued a cryptic tweet that many in the world of digital assets were interpreting as the billionaire’s breakup with bitcoin..

#Bitcoin 💔 pic.twitter.com/lNnEfMdtJf
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2021

About an hour later, he followed that with this tweet:

pic.twitter.com/MLhu6oOwgc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2021

A number of Musk’s recent tweets have sparked in the crypto community a mix of ebullience, confusion, apprehension and, at times, dread.

His social-media missives have had outsize influence on the prices of dogecoin and bitcoin and he’s at least partly blamed for the extant slump in bitcoin and the broader crypto complex. An article last month in The Wall Street Journal described him as bitcoin’s biggest influencer.

At last check Thursday night, bitcoin prices BTCUSD, -4.12% were down 2.3%, changing hands $37,762 according to CoinDesk data, slipping after the Tesla Inc. TSLA, -5.33% CEO’s most recent tweet.

The price of dogecoin DOGEUSD, -6.29%, for which Musk has been one of its biggest champions, was down 5.5%, changing hands at 38 cents.

Last month, Musk tweeted that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as payment for its vehicles, citing the large carbon footprint of digitally mining for bitcoin. The tweet is still reverberating in crypto circles, reigniting a debate about the sustainability of bitcoin mining.