Elon Musk has appeared to want to distance himself from Tesla‘s bitcoin purchase.
Yesterday during an interview with Bloomberg, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng CZ Zhao said he was surprised that Musk was so enthusiastic about Dogecoin, given that he bet $1.5 billion on Bitcoin with Tesla instead.
The related tweet was responded to directly by Elon Musk saying:
“Tesla’s action is not directly reflective of my opinion. Having some Bitcoin, which is simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash, is adventurous enough for an S&P500 company”.
Tesla’s action is not directly reflective of my opinion. Having some Bitcoin, which is simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash, is adventurous enough for an S&P500 company.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 19, 2021
This tweet, as well as many of Elon Musk’s others, is not easy to understand.
Elon Musk didn’t decide on Tesla’s Bitcoin investment?
In fact, the CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk himself, so surely the decision to invest $1.5 billion in BTC was approved by him.
It is true that the CFO of the company is Zach Kirkhorn, and it is possible that the decision is his, but it is unimaginable that such an initiative did not have Musk’s explicit consent.
However, back in April 2017, a group of influential Tesla investors, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, asked the company to add two independent members to the board so that they had no ties to Elon Musk himself, and since then the board has been exercising its business somewhat more independently of Musk than in the past. But even this does not really seem to justify this curious stance of the CEO towards corporate decisions.
It must also be said, however, that there has been a lot of confusion lately between Musk’s financial initiatives and those of Tesla, often incorrectly confusing one with the other.
So much so that in a subsequent tweet Musk had to add:
“To be clear, I am *not* an investor, I am an engineer. I don’t even own any publicly traded stock besides Tesla.
However, when fiat currency has negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere.
Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money. The key word is “almost”.”
Musk is probably just trying to make it clear that Tesla’s financial initiatives are not at all to be confused with his own, that they are different things, happening on different levels, and for different purposes.
Perhaps he is therefore not trying to distance himself from the company’s initiative to invest $1.5 in bitcoin, but from the fact that this is often incorrectly considered to be his personal initiative.
