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Elon Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal Musk, who is a longtime board member of Tesla, came out critical about the electric vehicle manufacturer’s decision to purchase $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) a year ago.
Speaking at the ETHDenver conference, he noted that Tesla was not considering the cryptocurrency’s carbon footprint and just looking at its potential as a store of value.
“When we invested in Bitcoin, we were very ignorant. We had no idea of the environmental impact. We literally didn’t know. We were like, ‘This seems like a good store of value. It’s a good way to diversify assets.’
It didn’t take very long to get probably a million messages telling us what we were doing to the environment.”
According to Kimbal Musk, Tesla’s mission of sustainability is contradictory to the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining. He said:
“Our company is about creating an alternative energy future, so we really were not informed enough when we made that decision.
We don’t necessarily regret it, but we are glad that things are moving towards a more environmentally friendly direction.”
Tesla had started accepting Bitcoin for payments in the beginning of 2021 but quickly removed the option over environmental concerns. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said shortly after to reconsider Bitcoin for payment once “there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50 percent) clean energy usage by miners with [a] positive future trend.”
Tesla’s latest filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reveals that company holds Bitcoin at a value of almost $2 billion as of December 31st, 2021.