Following reports that Elon Musk’s Tesla purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin on Monday, a Reddit post from early January started gaining attention thanks to its seemingly prescient prediction that Musk was going to make a big move on the cryptocurrency. The now-moderated post from “TSLAinsider” claimed to be from “a software dev working at R&D at Tesla in California” who said that the electric car company had purchased $800 million worth of Bitcoin. Despite the fact that Tesla purchased nearly double that amount, the post quickly garnered attention from the media for being the first to announce the investment. However, there was just one small problem: “TSLAinsider” is a 24-year-old college student in Germany who made the whole thing up while high on acid.
According to “TSLAinsider,” his plan was to simply make a “trollpost” for laughs. But in the process, he ended up accidentally reading the tea leaves from an exchange that Musk had with MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor in December. Saylor’s company had purchased $1 billion in Bitcoin in 2020, so the young German figured it’d be funny to joke that Musk was about to do the same. Via New York Post:
“Me and my girlfriend, we took acid, and I saw the conversation between Michael Saylor and Elon Musk on Twitter, and I was like, yeah, why shouldn’t he buy into bitcoin?” Hendrik told The Post in a Tuesday Zoom interview from Germany. “He’s crazy and he has a lot of money, so why not?”
Despite the trollpost and joking about Musk being “crazy,” Hendrick is actually a firm believer in Bitcoin being the “technology of the future,” and he praised the Tesla CEO for the purchase would encourage other companies to do the same. “They all want to be like Elon,” he told the Post.
(Via New York Post)