Electric car company Tesla moved all of its Bitcoin last week in a flurry of transactions. But Elon Musk’s firm likely shifted the coins to other wallets it controls, according to blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence.
Arkham posted the movements on Tuesday to Twitter (aka X), as it tracks the crypto movements of the car-making giant as it is one of the biggest publicly-traded companies to have invested in the leading cryptocurrency.
According to Arkham, the Bitcoin had not been moved for two years prior to October 15. The coins were put into seven new wallets believed to be controlled by the company.
𝗨𝗣𝗗𝗔𝗧𝗘: 𝗧𝗘𝗦𝗟𝗔 𝗕𝗜𝗧𝗖𝗢𝗜𝗡 𝗪𝗔𝗟𝗟𝗘𝗧𝗦
We believe that the Tesla wallet movements that we reported on last week were wallet rotations with the Bitcoin still owned by Tesla.
Tesla moved their entire balance of 11,509 BTC ($776.9M) to new wallets. pic.twitter.com/aWeHrwjo22
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) October 22, 2024
“We believe that the Tesla wallet movements that we reported on last week were wallet rotations with the Bitcoin still owned by Tesla,” Arkham said.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to Decrypt‘s questions, and did not reply to last week’s request to confirm the moves.
Tesla’s Bitcoin investment came back in 2021, with a $1.5 billion bet on the digital asset. Billionaire Elon Musk then backtracked from his support, and the company sold most of its holdings—at a loss.
The firm’s eccentric CEO said he had concerns over how bad mining Bitcoin was for the environment, and the company stopped accepting Bitcoin payments for its cars as a result.
But the Austin, Texas-based company still holds 11,509 Bitcoin, and the value of that cryptocurrency has grown substantially since the firm started dumping its holdings in 2022, worth approximately $776 million as of this writing.
The only public companies that have more Bitcoin are U.S. Bitcoin miners Riot and Marathon and software company MicroStrategy—the latter of which holds about $17 billion worth of BTC.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
