Crypto fan Elon Musk sold Tesla’s Bitcoins at the worst possible time

If Elon Musk’s obituary is ever written, 2025 will most likely be noted as his very own “annus horribilis.” Not only did Musk manage to spark a feud with his former friend President Donald Trump, but he also faced a difficult time in the crypto space.

2021-2022

His car company, Tesla (which Musk says will now focus on robots and self-driving cars), stated in its latest quarterly results that their crypto investments had increased from $722 million to a value of $1.24 billion. That sounds very promising, but when you consider that Musk actually sold Bitcoin at its lowest point instead of Hodling, you realize he’s been missing out on billions in the crypto market recently.

For this story, we have to go back to 2021, when Bitcoin was still trading at $20,000. At that time, Tesla announced that it was the first major company to invest in Bitcoin. Musk, the then-ultimate crypto fan, also stated that his CFO would henceforth be labeled “master of coin” (this was before he bought Twitter and renamed it X).

The news quickly sent Bitcoin up 15%, later that year trading at a value of $50,000 for the first time. However, during the disastrous year of 2022 (the bankruptcy of FTX), Tesla decided to sell most of its Bitcoin holdings, for a value of around $20,000 again. Since Tesla was still selling a lot of cars at the time, this wasn’t really a problem.

Tesla ended the year with some $300 million in Bitcoin.

2024-2025

But in the last two years, things have reversed course again. Because Musk aligned himself with Trump and made questionable statements, consumers became increasingly reluctant to buy a Tesla, and sales of the vehicles plummeted.

Tesla’s crypto holdings however, the majority of which Musk had already sold in 2022, reversed course and continued to rise. Analysts calculated that if Musk hadn’t sold his Bitcoin holdings in 2022, Tesla’s quarterly profit would have been around €3 billion higher.