Jonathan Ponciano, 13 June 2021
As the cryptocurrency market’s weeks-long rout continues, Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday afternoon to refute claims that he engaged in a bitcoin pump-and-dump scheme earlier this year and said the electric-vehicle company would once again invest in the world’s largest cryptocurrency once its mining operations constitute a “reasonable” amount of clean energy usage.
“This is not true,” Musk said in response to a Cointelegraph article highlighting comments in which Magda Wierzycka, the CEO of financial services firm Sygnia, criticized Musk for bitcoin “price manipulation.”
According to Wierzycka, an anti-corruption activist who made the comments in a podcast released Wednesday, Musk announced Tesla’s bitcoin investment on Twitter, then “pumped up the bitcoin price” by tweeting about it on social media and then “sold at the peak.”
