The company SpaceX, of which Elon Musk is the founder and CEO, appears to own nearly 8,300 Bitcoin.
This is what emerges from the report by Arkham Intelligence, which has managed to uncover what should be the public addresses belonging to the company.
Elon Musk buys Bitcoin for SpaceX and Tesla
From the Arkham report it emerges that the company acquired its first BTC at the beginning of 2021, when Tesla also purchased them.
According to the tracking of transaction history, in February 2021 SpaceX came to possess even more than 28,000 BTC.
At the time the price of Bitcoin was around $38,000, so in total SpaceX should have invested just under a billion dollars.
However, after selling a small portion in May of the same year, when the price was above $37,000, nearly 18,000 were sold between May and June of 2022, when the price had dropped below $29,000 following the implosion of the Terra/Luna crypto ecosystem, with an overall loss of about 120 million dollars.
Since then, however, he has not sold anymore, so much so that the almost 8,300 BTC he owned at the end of June 2022 are still the same ones he owns now.
Earnings and losses of the Bitcoin held by SpaceX
The current value of the nearly 8,300 BTC (Bitcoin) owned by SpaceX of Elon Musk is slightly below 490 million dollars.
It should be noted that the company has invested approximately 970 million dollars in BTC in total, in 2021, and that in 2022 from the two sales in May and June it collected approximately 505 million dollars. In February 2021 it had collected another 85, so in total from the three sales carried out so far it has collected more than 590 million dollars overall.
Therefore, despite a cumulative loss of almost 120 million dollars with the sales made in 2021/2022, thanks to the strong rise in the price of Bitcoin in 2024, they would now theoretically be in profit, albeit only potentially.
Just think that the purchase cost of the 8,300 BTC they still have in their portfolio was only 260 million dollars, but their current potential market value is close to 490 million. With these potential gains not yet realized, they not only manage to cover all the losses generated by the sales of 2022, but they even manage to make a profit.
In other words, they did very badly to sell in 2022 after the temporary collapse of the crypto market caused by the implosion of Terra/Luna, while in the end, for now, they did well to keep in their portfolio the 8,300 BTC they have held since then.
Tesla and Bitcoin
Arkham Intelligence is also able to monitor the public addresses of Tesla.
Although there are no absolute certainties that the addresses monitored by Arkham definitely correspond to those of SpaceX and Tesla, and many other entities, it is plausible that they might correspond.
According to the Arkham report on Tesla, the company acquired as many as 44,000 BTC at the beginning of 2021, and sold a total of 32,000 by June 2022.
This is therefore a strategy very similar to that of SpaceX, which produced significant losses in 2022, but in 2024 potentially recovered all the losses and moved into profit.
Even Tesla has as CEO Elon Musk, who between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 pushed Bitcoin a lot, and then pushed Dogecoin until May of the same year.
Since then, he has pulled back a bit from the crypto markets, slowly over the months, so much so that now despite having tried several times, he has not been able to pump the price of DOGE anymore.
His medium/short-term strategy on crypto has not paid off, in fact, it has produced losses. Instead, the long-term one is generating significant gains, even though for now they are only potential.
The cycles of the price of Bitcoin
What Elon Musk has probably underestimated is the consistency of Bitcoin cycles.
Bitcoin has a four-year cycle linked to the halving and the U.S. presidential elections. This cycle influences the entire crypto market.
After the third halving and the 2020 US presidential elections, there was the third great bullrun of Bitcoin, followed by the third great bear-market the following year. SpaceX and Tesla bought BTC in the middle of the bullrun, and sold in the middle of the bear-market.
In 2024 there was the fourth halving, and soon there will be the new presidential elections in the USA.
Although there is no guarantee that this time a new great bullrun will be triggered, it should not be forgotten that the halving is a certain and predictable event, and until today even the presidential elections in the USA have been.
Furthermore, in the long term, the price of Bitcoin tends to be inversely correlated to the market value of the US dollar, and the latter tends to fall after the presidential elections.
To this must be added that in fact the halving reduces the market supply of BTC, and if this last factor is added to the previous one, there seem to be once again the premises for a possible bullrun. This does not mean that the great bull runs of the price of Bitcoin are predictable, so much so that the one at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 was not, but that there are actual probabilities that another one could start in this last part of 2024.
