Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently saw his net worth jump by around $25 billion in 24 hours, with this occurring at the end of March this year when his company’s share value soared by 20%.
This pushed the iconic entrepreneur and space explorer’s personal fortune to $174 billion, closing the gap on Jeff Bezos and firmly establishing him as the world’s second richest man.
Interestingly, Musk is also a keen cryptocurrency speculator, while he has become increasingly influential in the marketplace. But just how influential is he, and should investors take him seriously?
Musk’s History with Cryptocurrency
Musk certainly has a prolonged and varied history with crypto, from having his image used as part of an elaborate crypto scam to becoming a major contributor to Bitcoin (BTC) as it embarked on a record bull run this year (we’ll touch more on this later in the piece).
Musk’s history in the crypto space can be traced back to March 2014, when it was widely speculated that he was actually the infamous and unknown BTC-founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
While this has since proven to be untrue, Musk has continued to comment and participate in the marketplace, initially showing skepticism regarding BTC as the asset shelved more than 50% of its value following its historic bull run in 2017.
Unfortunately, Musk’s crypto nadir came in 2018, when a group of fraudsters hacked into two verified branded accounts on Twitter (Matalan and Pathe UK), before changing the account names and images to pose as Elon Musk and promote a scam crypto giveaway.
The hackers ultimately managed to steal $157,000, casting an unfair slur on Musk without drawing a comment from the Tesla CEO.
Just How Influential is Musk?
The following year saw Musk change his mind on BTC, describing the token’s blockchain structure as being “quite brilliant”.
This trend has continued over time, with Musk breaking cover by acquiring a staggering $1.5 billion-worth of BTC tokens on behalf of the Tesla brand in February 2021. He also announced that Tesla would start to accept BTC as a form of payment, triggering a chain of events that saw the asset achieve a record price high above $63,000 in April.
Investors who were trading through the MT4 on Mac were quick to invest in BTC, offering an insight into Musk’s influence in the market.
This was borne out further in the summer, when he reversed Tesla’s decision to accept BTC payments amid concerns over the blockchain’s intensive mining process and their environmental impact.
He has welcomed changes to BTC’s proof-of-work mining concept, heralding this as a significant development and precipitating a steady price hike through Q3 and into the beginning of quarter four.
While Musk is clearly a market influencer, the same can be said of other market leading entrepreneurs and billionaires such as Bill Gates. Also, it’s unclear whether Musk is a serious BTC investor or simply seeks to manipulate the market to his own ends, with his erratic behaviour through 2021 perhaps hinting at the latter.
Regardless, Musk has had a huge impact on BTC’s price fluctuations in 2021, and investors will surely be looking out for further comment and interaction in the near-term.
