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if I was a Tesla shareholder, I would be annoyed.
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Well,
first of all a disclaimer: all that I am going to write is meant to be read through the eyes of the TSLA investor, not the bitcoin supporter writing on bitcointalk.org.
TSLA has 20 billion in cash&equivalent. This is not much for an 820 billion company. AAPL, for example, a 2.3 trillion company, almost 4 times bigger, has 195 Billion in cash&equivalent instruments, almost 10 times more. Basically, TSLA is already, or various reasons, but mainly for the early stage of their business cycle, a cash-strapped company. The objective of a good treasurer is to optimise this amount, having in mind the future cash flows of the company: finance for this kind of companies should always be ancillary to the core operations of the firm.
For example, this is something I am not sure happened with Microstrategy, that issued a subordinated bond only to invest in Bitcoin the proceed of such sale.
I think that for TSLA, investing 1.5billions is really the minimum amount to be considered as an investment. Today TSLA gained 1.31%. This equates to 7 billions of dollar growth in market capitalisation. This is an amount 8 times bigger than the potential loss of bitcoin going to zero and they holding the whole investment.
From what they have written in the filing, I guess that, contrary to Microstrategy, their investment for sure is for "ideological reasons", but mainly as a way to enhance the treasury management, and having a better yield on their financial performance. I am ready to see them selling when in needs to finance their next giga-factory or the ramp-up of a new model.
Similarly, the potential negative effect of the volatility of BTC price fluctuation on the TSLA shares would be negligible. First of all because even if Bitcoin had a surge in volatility, this would affect only the 0.2% of the market capitalisation, secondly because TSLA already exhibits higher volatility than bitcoin.
I think this covers only the downside of Bitcoin investing, leaving out the obvious upside of a BTC appreciation.
Due to this very asymmetric payoff, I think the move TSLA made is absolutely prudential and organic to share growth, without putting anything at risk.
This is something very different from what I am seeing being done at Microstrategy (where a very different
ownership structure allows Micheal Saylor doing, basically, everything he wants with corporate, money).