Elon Musk is not only playing the “will they, won’t they” with the Tesla Cybertruck but is not flip-flopping on Tesla accepting Bitcoin as payment for its cars. As most investors saw a few months ago, when Elon Musk said Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin due to its environmental impact, the market plunged by tens of thousands of dollars nearly overnight. Now, the self-appointed “Technoking” has flipped back and said that since Bitcoin has worked to make its currency more green, Tesla “most likely” back on board. 

Can you use Bitcoin to buy a Tesla? 

At the moment, Tesla still doesn’t accept Bitcoin. However, it seems that if the cryptocurrency continues its green initiatives, then Tesla will take it back. Tesla’s CEO said that the amount of non-renewable energy needed to power the computers that mine the blockchain coins is too detrimental to the environment for Tesla to support it. 

This is confusing and a bit of a red flag because Elon Musk is quite aware that his tweets and comments on cryptocurrency have far-reaching implications that affect the market. When he was on Saturday Night Live, he made a point to talk about the meme coin, Dogecoin, too raise the price. This performance came on the heels of Musk announcing that Tesla would start accepting Bitcoin in March. The result of this announcement was a massive jump in value for Bitcoin. 

So, when he turned around only two months later and said that Tesla would stop taking Bitcoin, the currency dropped from nearly $60,000 per coin to a fluid $30,000. 

Why is Tesla changing its stance on Bitcoin?

According to AutoBlog, Elon Musk said, “I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50 percent and that there is a trend toward increasing that number, and if so, Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin,” at the B-Word conference. Elon Musk concluded by saying, “Most likely, the answer is that Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin.” 

Obviously, Musk’s personal finance choices and his professional life as CEO of THE electric car company got crossways. Since so much of Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s ethos is wrapped up in environmentalism, using a currency that is massively taxing on the environment is a bad look. 

While Tesla’s flip-flopping on the issue has been annoying and cost a lot of people a lot of money, his rejection of the coin for Tesla seems to have pushed not only Bitcoin to be more green, but other coins are following suit. 

“Tesla’s mission is accelerating the advent of sustainable energy. We can’t be the company that does that and also not do appropriate diligence on the energy usage of bitcoin,” Musk said.

Did Elon Musk and Tesla profit from this Bitcoin back and forth? 

While speaking at the Bitcoin conference, Musk added that he personally owned bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin, apart from bitcoin that Tesla and SpaceX owned.

“I might pump, but I don’t dump,” Musk said. “I definitely do not believe in getting the price high and selling… I would like to see bitcoin succeed.” 

When Musk pumped up the cryptocurrencies and then sharply took it all back, many investors blamed him for the sharp loss and speculated that he must have sold out his shares before dropping Bitcoin from Tesla’s approved payment methods. 

His comments here are clearly addressing those accusations. All we know right now is that this news will most likely send some pretty big waves through the stock market and crypto market. If the past year has shown anything about the market, it can be a fickle and tumultuous space, particularly with these digital currencies.