The recent rise in the price of bitcoin (BTC) has skyrocketed its market capitalization to $440.56 billion. The cryptocurrency has thus outperformed some of the stock market’s top assets, including Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer owned by Elon Musk.
The company has a market capitalization of $421.3 billion, according to CompaniesMarketCap data.
Bitcoin increased its market capitalization by more than $39.02 billion in a single week, after starting a bull rally in early January.
BTC’s price started Monday’s trading day above $22.8 billion, capping off a positive week for the parent cryptocurrency, which culminated with it crossing the $23 billion barrier over the weekend.
For its part, Tesla is grappling with rising costs and supply chain disruptions plaguing the auto industry, as well as the loss of a significant portion of its share price in 2022.
Last December, Tesla’s share price posted its worst performance in its history after plummeting 36%, which was the company’s worst performance to date.
According to BrandFinance, the electric car maker is the ninth most valuable company on the planet and the largest in the auto industry.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Elon Musk had sold some 3.6 billion shares of Tesla stock before news broke of the drop in vehicle deliveries that had so badly affected the value of his cars earlier in the year.
Tesla reduced the price of the Model 3 and Model Y in China and the United States, with cuts of between 6% and 13.5%.
Tesla and Musk have had a spotty relationship with Bitcoin
The electric vehicle company invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in February 2021, after changing its investment policy in January to allow digital asset holdings. At the time, it was considered a very bullish move. So much so that BTC reached a new all-time high of $43,000.
Then, in May 2021, Musk appeared to sour on BTC when he announced that Tesla would stop accepting it as payment, citing concerns about the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.
Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021
In its first-quarter 2022 report, filed in April, TSLA wrote that it believed in the “long-term potential of Bitcoin digital assets as an investment and also as a liquid alternative to cash.”
But it also warned shareholders that price changes tend to affect its profitability, which now seems a harbinger of Wednesday’s announcement.
“For example, in the first quarter of 2021, we recorded approximately $27 million of impairment losses from the change in the carrying value of our Bitcoins and gains of $128 million on certain Bitcoin sales by us,” the company wrote in its April 25 SEC filing.
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