On Monday (14 November 2022), the Bitcoin price, which had fallen below $16,000 to reach its lowest level in over a year, started surging shortly after bullish comments from Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, as well as from Binance Co-Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”).
According to data byTradingView, just before the tweets from Musk and CZ (which were sent out around 6:40 a.m. UTC on 14 November 2022), Bitcoin was trading around $15,948 (having fallen below the $16K roughly two hours earlier), and shortly after the tweet, the $BTC price started surging, reaching $16,821 by 7:51 a.m. UTC):
It all started yesterday (13 November 2022) when angel investor and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis asked on Twitter where Bitcoin’s price (which reached an all-time high of around $69,000 on 10 November 2021) would be in a year from now:
Roughly a day later, Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October 2022, sent out a tweet that suggested he remains confident in Bitcoin’s future:
What was notable for this tweet is that although Musk likes Bitcoin and Tesla has invested in Bitcoin, Musk has rarely tweeted about Bitcoin (with the exception of last year when he expressed concern over Bitcoin mining’s energy consumption), instead focusing his attention on Dogecoin ($DOGE), which he called his favorite cryptocurrency back in April 2019:
In fact, someone was so surprised that today’s tweet was about Bitcoin rather than Dogecoin that they made the following joke:
According to Tesla’s Q3 2022 Update, which was released on 19 October 2022, as of the end of Q3 2022, Tesla still held $218 million worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
As for CZ, at 6:39 a.m. UTC on 14 November 2022, he made a very important announcement:
On 12 November 2012, Musk confirmed that back in April he had asked Morgan Stanley’s Michael Grimes if former FTX CEO Samuel Bankman-Fried (aka “SBF”) really had $3 billion in liquid assets to invest in Twitter.
It all started when a Twitter account (“Internal Tech Emails”) that highlights internal tech industry emails that surface in public records tweeted about an email exchange between Musk and Grimes (who is a Managing Director and Head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley) about SBF and his expression of interest to help Musk with the latter’s plan to buy Twitter. In one email message, Musk asked Grimes if SBF actually had $3 billion in liquid assets, and Grimes replied that he thought SBF did have this much in liquid assets.
Musk replied to to the post by “Internal Tech Emails” by saying that this exchange of emails had really happened, and that the reason he was skeptical that SBF had sufficient funds was that SBF had set off his BS detector:
Well, according to a report by CoinDesk published on 12 November 2022, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces session around 7:30 a.m. UTC on that day to discuss with several member of the crypto community the alleged attack on FTX’s wallets by a hacker, and expressed what he thinks of the former FTX CEO:
“To be honest, I’d never heard of him, but then I got a ton of people telling me [that] he’s got, you know, huge amounts of money that he wants to invest in the Twitter deal. And I talked to him for about half an hour. And I know my bullshit meter was redlining. It was like, this dude is bullshit – that was my impression…
“Then I was like, man, everyone including major investment banks – everyone was talking about him like he’s walking on water and has a zillion dollars. And that [was] not my impression…that dude is just – there’s something wrong, and he does not have capital, and he will not come through. That was my prediction.“
Musk also said that it was important to do self custody of your crypto rather than leaving it on an exchange:
“I would reaffirm that, if you have crypto, you should have it in a directly-accessible cold wallet. Not in an exchange. That would be wise.“
Image Credit
Featured Image via Pixabay
