NEW DELHI: Tesla Inc’s June quarter earnings on Monday showed that the US-based electric car company was still holding $1.3 billion worth of bitcoin on its balance sheet, putting to rest speculations that the company might have trimmed its position during the period. This also means that Tesla hasn’t added to its digital assets position.
In its quarterly earnings, Tesla also said that it took a bitcoin-related impairment charge of $23 million.
The American carmaker’s chief Elon Musk in February 2021 had announced that the company had invested $1.5 billion in the digital asset. It had also revealed plans to accept bitcoin as payment for its cars.
Musk later in the March quarter earnings report revealed that Tesla had sold 10% of its holdings to prove liquidity of bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash on the balance sheet.
Then in May, the company stopped accepting bitcoin as payment over environmental concerns due to high energy consumption during mining of the digital asset.
Meanwhile, Musk recently revealed that Tesla would soon resume accepting bitcoin.
“I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50%, and that there is a trend towards increasing that number, and if so Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin,” Musk said during the B Word cryptocurrency conference.
According to a report by the Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) released earlier this month, the global bitcoin mining industry’s sustainable electricity mix more than doubled to around 56% during the June quarter. The share of green energy in bitcoin mining in the preceding March quarter was 36.8%.
On Monday, the US electric carmaker said that its quarterly profit topped $1 billion level for the first time ever.
According to an AFP report, record deliveries of electric cars during the period allowed Elon Musk’s company to garner earnings of $1.1 billion in the quarter, up from $104 million in the year-ago period as revenues nearly doubled to $12.0 billion.
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