Bitcoin Drops After Musk Suggests Tesla May Sell Holdings, Says It Hasn't Yet
Bitcoin rebounds after its initial decline.
May 16, 2021 at 8:11 p.m. UTCUpdated Mar 2, 2023 at 8:51 p.m. UTC
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UPDATE (May 17, 11:42 UTC): After a steep sell-off over the weekend and early Monday to as low as $42,185, bitcoin's price bounced back to just over $45,000.
Bitcoin's weekend price slide took the largest cryptocurrency down to nearly $42,000 before it rebounded to just over $45,000, down 8.9% over the past 24 hours.
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It was the third straight daily decline, coinciding with a series of tweets by Tesla CEO Elon Musk during which he initially failed to outright deny that his electric-car company has sold or could soon sell all of its more than $1 billion holdings of bitcoin because of the criticism he has received after Tesla suspended bitcoin as a form of payment. Later, he clarified that Tesla hadn't sold any bitcoin.
- "Indeed," Musk tweeted at 2:48 p.m. ET on Sunday in a response to a tweet by Twitter handle @CryptoWhale, which said that "Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings."
- Bitcoin's price dropped immediately after the tweet to almost $45,100 and eventually sank to as low as $42,185.
- BTC bounced back to above $45,000 after Musk confirmed that Tesla has not sold its bitcoin holdings some 10 hours after this story was published. He tweeted: "To clarify speculation, Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin."
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
- In recent trading, bitcoin had rebounded a bit to $45,627.90, down 8.1% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk 20.
- Earlier the day, Musk also tweeted at Peter McCormack, who posted a Twitter thread about Musk's criticism of bitcoin and support for dogecoin, saying that "obnoxious threads like this make me want to go all in on Doge."
- At press time, DOGE was changing hands at $0.505, down 5.1% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk data.
- Last Wednesday, Musk announced that Tesla was discontinuing bitcoin payments because of concerns about its impact on the environment. That news sent bitcoin down by $2,000.
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