"You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin... Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency"
Turns out it will in fact be converted to fiat currency while Elon continues to pump his bags on Twitter.
"What does the future hodl?"
In any other asset class this would be blatant, illegal market manipulation.
I believe this is what you call the ol' pump-n-dump.
A) Tesla Inc's own purchase of bitcoin's were traded at a profit, this has nothing to do with bitcoin they earned from people buying cars with bitcoin. That's not a pivot from anything.
B) Voluntarily disclosing you are buying something, which Elon and Tesla Inc did, has nothing to do with selling it. There is no regulation in the securities or futures market that would have changed that. You are suggesting a fictional higher standard exclusively for cryptocurrencies. In the securities market, disclosure for all trades exists when the owner is more than 5% or 10% of the total supply. There is no regulation that would have applied here even if crypto was regulated like securities or futures, except possibly the disclosure that they bought bitcoin into the company balance sheet because in 2020 that would be considered a material change for any equity investor. They filed the 8-K and posted on twitter to avoid non-disclosure scrutiny, and they get a nice pump out of it from people that derive their confidence in cryptocurrencies from S&P 500 CEOs.
C) You, again. Creating negative conflated conclusions for benign crypto topics, again. Why do you do that? There is a mild chuckle to be had about Tesla goosing earnings by flipping their bitcoin within a quarter, but adding all that extra fluff onto it? Why?
Would this be okay to do as a private individual?
I'm just thinking that if he doesn't mention any of his companies and just say something like: "I like this stock/crypto", if that would still be illegal and/or market manipulation.
Then some days later, make payment available with Bitcoin.
Totally. That would be the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and 18 U.S. Code Sections 371, 1341, 1343, 1348, and 1349. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you if you’d like to read the full text but an analysis is available as [1].
There’s a reason Tim Cook isn’t out on Twitter shilling the companies Apple has invested in while selling their shares. I’m led to believe Club Fed isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Did you read your own link? It about "pump and dump" schemes and explains that they are fundamentally about false positive statements.
"Generally, securities fraud occurs when someone makes a false or misleading positive statement about a company or the value of its stock, inducing others to make a financial decision based on that false statement."
This is Musk's exact defense - he very cleverly says nothing concretely positive about anything, and very specifically puts it in a public forum with Twitter.
It's quite brilliant, although maddening to folks with less of a stomach... which is why he's in the position he's in - he makes those grey-area decisions.
Where all of them add up in the future, only time will tell - but for now, results are squarely in his favor.
Cryptocurrency is not a stock and lots of people make predictions and bold statements about other things like gold and silver.
Nothing here would be significant if the other side of the equation wasn't people soaking up the slightest drip of nonsense and turning it into a frenzy of something they don't understand.
This is interesting, I would have expected a loss. I recall MSTR had to report a loss in 2020 even though it went up a lot, due to how GAAP works with bitcoin. Basically if you buy bitcoin (or any property) at $X, then it dips to $Y, then goes back up to $Z, you have to report the difference between X and Y (purchase price - lowest point) as a GAAP loss.
I believe this is what you call the ol' pump-n-dump.