NewsTesla, Elon Musk, Reddit leak
Feb 10, 2021 04:36 AM EST
A Reddit poster who claimed to have some insider information of Tesla Inc's (NASDAQ: TSLA) investment in Bitcoin (BTC) alleged that the information he shared to the public back on Jan. 2 was actually not true, or at least not based on some fact at the time he shared it.
According to the the New York Post, the Reddit poster has come clean. There was no leak after all, just some fun made-up prediction that actually came true.
It can be remembered that when Tesla announced its investment on Bitcoin back in Monday, people's attention turned towards the Reddit post that @TSLAInsider wrote five weeks before said announcement.
"I am a software dev working at R&D at Tesla in California, over the past 72 hours our company bought 24701 BTC at an average price of 33142$," the user with the handle TSLAinsider posted on Reddit last month," the post read, which was reported by Reuters.
Today, the Post is reporting that the Reddit user behind the TSLAInsider handle is just 24-year old German political science student named Hendrik and that whatever was written on the pst were pure lies.
"If you want to know the truth: I am a young German guy and I was on Acid while I did this post in the last month," Hendrik told the Post in an interview.
"I had this afflatus that Elon is going to buy Bitcoin, so I created this trollpost. And now all the newspapers around the globe are writing about it, its kinda funny and scary to be honest," he explained.
The user posted a link to the Post's story, which implied that he is corroborating it.
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Lie or no lie, leak or mere joke, one thing remains: Elon Musk's actual investment on Bitcoin is big news.
The immediate impact is evidence enough.
The bitcoin price hiked up to an all-time high of above $48,000 on Tuesday morning as investors rushed into the asset themselves just because Elon Musk did it.
It can be recalled that Tesla said it had bought up $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin slipped back a little, but was up 6% to $46,214 as of 9am ET once more, as reported by the Business Insider.
One major bitcoin investor predicts the price going up as high $100,000 by the end of 2021.
"You're going to see every company in America do the same thing [as Tesla]," Novogratz, the founder of crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital, told Bloomberg.
Musk's electric car company Tesla certainly caused a ruckus, or a stampede so to speak towards the digital currency.
Tesla has also already said it planned to start accepting bitcoin as payment.
The implications of this remains to be seen.
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