Elon Musk Tweets Send BTC Down 16% to $42K in Weekend Slide
2 min read
The price of BTC dropped to lows of $42,024 on Monday morning, continuing its downward trend from last week and marking a fall of 16% from its Saturday high of $50,615.
Although BTC has since recovered to its current value of just under $45,000, it marks a continuing slide in the cryptocurrency’s price following Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s announcement that the carmaker would stop accepting BTC as payment.
Tesla’s move was prompted by concerns over the cryptocurrency’s environmental impact, Musk explained. “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for BTC mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” the Tesla CEO said in a tweet last week.
Over the weekend, crypto prices continued to tumble after Musk responded to a suggestion that “Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #BTC holdings,” with the single word, “Indeed.” Musk later noted in a tweet that “to clarify speculation, Tesla has not sold any BTC.”
To clarify speculation, Tesla has not sold any BTC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2021
BTC struggles with Musk’s U-turn
On May 12, before Musk’s announcement that Tesla would stop accepting BTC, the cryptocurrency’s price was as high as $57,700.
Since then, however, it has steadily decreased. According to CoinGecko, BTC is down 8% in just the last 24 hours. In the last week, BTC has fallen by 22%.
The downward trend is the latest in a long line of examples where Elon Musk’s tweets have moved the BTC market.
Three months prior to his U-turn, Musk appeared to be all-in on BTC, overseeing Tesla’s whopping $1.5 billion investment in the flagship cryptocurrency on February 8, 2021.
One hour after Tesla’s investment became known, BTC surged by almost 10% to what was then an all-time high of $44,790.
Musk’s impact on the crypto market is well-documented; when the Tesla CEO updated his Twitter bio to #BTC, the Blockchain Research Lab found that BTC’s price increased by over 18% as a result.
