On Wednesday (February 10), Elon Musk, the world’s second richest person (according to the Forbes’ “The Real-Time Billionaires List“), gave crypto investors some important advice.
Musk, who is a co-founder of PayPal, founder and CEO of SpaceX, and a co-founder and CEO of Tesla, decided to make his views on crypto wallets be known after Freewallet, which is a crypto wallet that is available on both the web and mobile, replied on February 8 to a tweet he had made about Dogecoin (DOGE) on February 7:
Musk, however, was not impressed by Freewallet’s show of support for Dogecoin (Musk’s favorite meme cryptocurrency), and pointed out that the Freewallet moble app “sucks” and proceeded to explain why:
Bitcoin advocate/influencer and author Andreas M. Antonopoulos has repeatedly talked about the importance of investors holding private keys for their wallet, which has led to the popular mantra “not your keys, not your coins”.
On Monday (February 8), Tesla filed its 2020 annual report (on Form 10-K) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); this report disclosed that the electric car maker had already invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin.
The relevant section of the annual report reads:
“In January 2021, we updated our investment policy to provide us with more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity. As part of the policy, which was duly approved by the Audit Committee of our Board of Directors, we may invest a portion of such cash in certain alternative reserve assets including digital assets, gold bullion, gold exchange-traded funds and other assets as specified in the future.
“Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt.“
On January 31, Musk talked about Bitcoin during an interview on audio-based social network Clubhouse:
“I do at this point think Bitcoin is a good thing… I am a supporter of Bitcoin… Bitcoin is on the verge of getting broad acceptance by traditional finance people… I don’t have a strong opinion on other cryptocurrencies.“
Musk also talked about his DOGE-related tweets:
“They are really just meant to be jokes, but you know Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies obviously, but fate loves irony and often as a friend of mine says that the most ironic outcome or I’d say the most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of earth in the future.“
