While speaking at the recently held Ethereum Denver conference, Kimbal Musk who is a board member of electric vehicle giant Tesla and brother to billionaire Elon Musk, revealed that the company was ignorant of the environmental impact of Bitcoin. According to him, Tesla was oblivious of the detrimental effect that Bitcoin had on the environment when it invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and allowed people to buy its vehicles with Bitcoin.
According to him, “When we invested in Bitcoin, we were very ignorant. We had no idea of the environmental impact, we literally didn’t know, we were like this seems like a good store of value and a good way to diversify assets. And of course, it didn’t take very long to get a million — I’m not kidding probably a million — messages telling us what we were doing to the environment. And of course, our company is about creating alternative energy futures so we really were not informed enough when we made that decision”. He made the revelation while answering questions from a reporter.
Early last year, while Bitcoin was making the headlines for its astronomical gains, Tesla decided to diversify its assets and invested the sum of $1.5 billion, allowing its vehicles to be purchased using the crypto asset. Eventually, this was discontinued out of concerns of environmental sustainability. The company rescinded its decision to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.
According to Kimbal, the company does not necessarily regret its decision to invest in Bitcoin. He hopes that a more environmental-friendly method of mining would be introduced so that Bitcoin can thrive. He also noted that his philanthropic organization Big Green had adopted a crypto-native DAO structure and is operating on a less energy-intensive blockchain. “I really do not agree with the environmental impact of crypto, but I love what it does”, he said.
“So we’ve just got to figure out how to do it without the environmental impact. It’s simply not an option to have this environmental impact”, he added.
Although Tesla stopped accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment for its vehicles, the company still holds Bitcoin as part of its assets and has reiterated its stance that it isn’t selling… “Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy”, Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted last year.
According to a SEC filing that appeared earlier this month, Tesla held Bitcoin worth almost $2 billion at the end of 2021. Last month, Elon Musk announced that Dogecoin, which consumes less power, could be used to buy some of Tesla merchandise.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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