Oh, Elon Musk… You just can’t seem to make up your mind, can you? One minute, you’re all over bitcoin and investing billions of dollars in the world’s number one digital currency by market cap. The next minute, you’re saying something that doesn’t work well for the asset and every trader – yourself included – winds up experiencing some level of loss.
Elon Musk Has Potentially Caused a Dip in the BTC Price
This is the case behind last weekend’s market dip, in which bitcoin saw its price stumble by roughly ten percent over the course of 24 hours. Musk – the South African entrepreneur behind mega companies such as SpaceX and Tesla – claimed in a series of tweets that bitcoin’s price was a bit “too high.” Naturally, the world’s primary digital currency reacted negatively to this statement, and it wasn’t long before the asset took a dip that saw it’s price falling from around $56,000 to $53,000 per unit.
Musk has always been there to discuss bitcoin and crypto, but sometimes, it feels like it’s because he’s got nothing better to do. One moment, he’s making one of the largest institutional purchases of the asset. The next, he’s saying that bitcoin “isn’t his safe word” or something else that really has investors and traders scratching their heads and saying, “Huh?”
This appears to be one of those times. What was the point of such tweets? Surely, by now, Musk realizes that he has heavy control over assets like bitcoin and where they go in the future. His words can typically have major influence over the coin and its many crypto cousins and bear influence over whether the price of BTC falls or spikes.
Aside from his “tweet attack” on the BTC price, Musk was also quick to target Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the number one competitor to bitcoin. He mentioned that the currency’s price was “excessive,” having just hit a new all-time high of more than $1,900 per token. Either way, it looks like Musk’s words have had something of a reverse effect in that his own investments are likely suffering at this time.
A Loss of $150 Million?
Recently, the electric car company he heads purchased as much as $1.5 billion worth of the asset. If bitcoin has fallen by ten percent at press time, that means Musk has lost as much as $150 million.
The good news is that the currency has already recovered somewhat. Some media outlets report that the currency fell below the $50,000 line and was briefly trading for as low as $47,000 per unit. Thus, the fact that it’s already gained another $6,000 this quickly is a positive sign. Perhaps these tweets can potentially disappear and BTC can quickly regain its footing, but this should probably serve as a lesson for people who would like BTC’s price to remain high.
