Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated that his company will likely start accepting Bitcoin for vehicle purchases again despite previously expressing worries over the carbon emissions of Bitcoin mining.
CNBC reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently stated that his electric car manufacturer is likely to start accepting Bitcoin for vehicle purchases again; this represents a complete reversal of his previous statement that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as a payment method due to the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.
Speaking at the B-Word Conference, an event hosted by the Crypto Council for Innovation, Musk stated: “It looks like bitcoin is shifting a lot more toward renewables and a bunch of the heavy-duty coal plants that were being used…have been shut down, especially in China.”
Musk added: “I want to do a little 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 toward increasing that number. If so, Tesla will most likely resume accepting bitcoin.”
In May, Musk tweeted that Tesla “suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin,” out of worries related to the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining.”
Since then, Beijing has cracked down on crypto and expelled crypto miners. New data from Cambridge University now show that many miners are headed to the U.S., which is now the second-biggest destination for the world’s Bitcoin miners.
Musk has been very positive about China’s efforts in recent months, taking to the Chinese social media platform Weibo to praise the Chinese Communist Party. Breitbart News reported in July:
On the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, Musk posted a response to the CCP’s newswire agency Xinhua on Twitter — a service which is banned in China — saying: “The economic prosperity that China has achieved is truly amazing, especially in infrastructure! I encourage people to visit and see for themselves.”
The Xinhua post Musk responded to was quoting Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who claimed: “China has realised the first centenary goal — building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. This means that we have brought about a historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty in China, and we are now marching in confident strides toward the second centenary goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects.”
The false claim that China has eliminated poverty comes from the regime artificially lowering the standard of extreme poverty from the World Bank’s threshold of $1.90 per day to the new communist standard of $1.52 per day.
Later in July, it was reported that Tesla asked China to use its censorship powers to shut down criticism of its products on social media. Breitbart News reported:
“At the Shanghai Auto Show in April, a woman who claimed that a brake failure in her Model 3 had caused a crash, nearly killing four of her family members, staged a solitary protest at the Tesla booth. After climbing on top of a vehicle wearing a T-shirt that read “brake lost control” in Chinese, she was quickly hauled away by guards.”
Tesla apologized for the error following the wide criticism the company’s response received on social media and from state-run news sources.
Per Bloomberg Businessweek, Tesla “complained to the government over what it sees as unwarranted attacks on social media, and asked Beijing to use its censorship powers to block some of the posts.”
U.S. legislators have previously expressed concern over the potential spillover effects for national security that can come from the close relationship that Musk — who is a major Pentagon contractor as the CEO of SpaceX— has with the communist regime.
Read more at Breitbart News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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