Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla has informed the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a quarterly filing that it may resume the practice of trading cryptocurrencies for its products and services. Tesla suspended accepting bitcoin in May, citing environmental concerns.
Tesla May Resume Bitcoin Acceptance, SEC Filing Says
Tesla Inc. filed a quarterly report with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.
The company explained that during the nine months ended Sept. 20, it “purchased an aggregate of $1.50 billion in bitcoin.” In its third quarter earnings report, Tesla’s balance sheet shows bitcoin worth $ 1.26 billion, after reporting bitcoin-related depreciations over the past two quarters.
The SEC filing further states that during the three months ended March 31, Tesla “accepted bitcoin as a payment for sales of certain of our products in specified regions, subject to applicable laws.” However, the company noted that it “had suspended this practice in May 2021”. Tesla continued:
We may in the future restart the practice of transacting in cryptocurrencies (‘digital assets’) for our products and services.
The electric car maker, whose market capitalization hit $ 1,000 billion for the first time this week, said it was “halting purchases of vehicles using bitcoin” due to concerns “about the increase rapid use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of all fuels.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk then tried to convince bitcoin miners to use renewable energy. In May, he spoke with North American bitcoin miners, after which they formed a Bitcoin Mining Council to “promote transparency in energy use and accelerate sustainability initiatives around the world.”
In June, Musk tweeted: “When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions.”
At the “B Word” event in July, he said: “It looks like Bitcoin is turning a lot more to renewables and a bunch of heavy-duty coal-fired power plants that were in use… have been shut down, especially in China.” He added: “I want to do a little more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50% and that there is a trend toward increasing that number. If so, Tesla will most likely resume accepting bitcoin.”
While Tesla only accepted bitcoin, Musk conducted a Twitter poll in May to ask his followers if Tesla should accept dogecoin (DOGE). 78.2% of more than 3.9 million votes were in favor of Tesla accepting the meme cryptocurrency. Musk recently confirmed that he personally owns bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin. Meanwhile, his companies, Tesla and Spacex, only own bitcoin.
