Elon Musk, the chief executive of TeslaTSLA and owner of X (Twitter), is known for his ability to cause wild bitcoin price swings (with a recent leak revealing he’s plotting something big).
The bitcoin price, after soaring through 2021 thanks to support from the likes of Elon Musk, has crashed back, dropping 70% from its all-time high and wiping $2 trillion from the wider crypto market—with fears now swirling over the future of the technology.
Now, bitcoin has reportedly passed the renewable energy milestone that Musk said would mean Tesla could resume accepting bitcoin as payment, just as Musk has quietly begun building X into a payments powerhouse.
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“The bitcoin energy narrative is flipping,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jamie Coutts posted to X alongside a note showing “the rapid rise of sustainable energy sources” in the production of new bitcoin, a process known as mining.
“Falling emissions plus a dramatically rising hash rate can only mean one thing; Bitcoin mining is consuming more sustainable energy in its mix,” Coutts said, pointing to modelling by renewable energy investor Daniel Batten that found sustainable energy now accounts for 53% of bitcoin’s total energy use.
In June 2021, Musk pulled the plug on Tesla’s bitcoin payments, claiming it would restart them once clean energy usage by miners was around 50%.
“When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions,” Musk posted to what was then called Twitter.
In February of 2021, Tesla stunned markets when it revealed it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and announced it would begin accepting bitcoin as payment. However, bitcoin payments lasted until just mid-May, with Musk citing bitcoin’s eye-watering energy use.
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“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk said at the time.
Since then, Musk has apparently soured on bitcoin, selling off most of Tesla’s bitcoin, though has maintained a closer relationship with dogecoin, a meme-based bitcoin rival.
Last month, a leak has suggested Musk could turn X into an “updated version of PayPal” after he bought the social network last year, feeding speculation X could follow PayPal in offering bitcoin and crypto support.
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