Elon Musk’s Tesla is now over $1 billion in the green on its Bitcoin investment as the price nears $58,000 for the first time since early May.
Tesla holds about 42,902 BTC, worth nearly $2.5 billion at the time of writing. The company bought roughly $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin back in February when it first added Bitcoin to its balance sheet.
In Q2, Tesla sold 10% of its Bitcoin holdings at an average price of around $50,000 per token. CEO Elon Musk later took to Twitter to clarify that Tesla sold 10% of its BTC holdings to prove the asset’s liquidity and viability as an alternative to cash on its balance sheet.
In its Q2 earnings report, Tesla announced that it booked gains worth $128 million from its Bitcoin sale.
The car manufacturer has gained approximately 65% or $1 billion since its initial Bitcoin investment. This is as much as its income from selling 201,250 cars in Q2. Currently companies that aren’t investment companies, such as Tesla, report Bitcoin as intangible assets. This means Bitcoin gets recorded on balance sheets at its historic cost and is then impaired if the value dips. Although the value can never be revised upward if the price of Bitcoin increases.
Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy recently wrote to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, “This disconnect between an entity’s financial statements and the economic reality of its financial condition and results of operations creates confusion and fails to provide investors, analysts, and the general public with the information they need to make an informed assessment of an entity’s current and future prospects.”
The question is not if but when other large companies will follow suit with MicroStrategy, Tesla, and Square, and add Bitcoin to the balance sheet.