On Wednesday, Elon Musk disclosed at a conference that Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) would "most likely" resume accepting bitcoin as payment again for its electric vehicles. According to Musk, this decision will be dependent on whether the percentage of renewable energy usage used to mine the cryptocurrency will be trending towards 50% or more.
Musk made this statement while attending The B Word online conference hosted by the Crypto Council for Innovation on Wednesday, which featured Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter and Square, and Cathie Wood, chief executive of Ark Invest.
Elon had also revealed that both his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, held significant investments in bitcoin, and that he held personal investments in bitcoin, ethereum, and dogecoin. As a result, bitcoin and ethereum rose 8% and 11.6% respectively following the conference.
Recently, Tesla has been the target of increased criticism by investors and environmentalists, as the process of bitcoin mining has been revealed to cause significant negative environmental impacts and require large amounts of fossil fuels. Though Tesla remains a large investor and a strong advocate for bitcoin’s success, the company stepped back from accepting the cryptocurrency as payment in May of this year to conduct due diligence on the energy usage of bitcoin.
Musk stated that he would be looking towards re-accepting bitcoin payments once bitcoin mining could be primarily done using sources of renewable energy.