Tesla Buys $1.5 Billion In Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency’s price soars after electric-vehicle maker says it soon expects to accept customer payments in bitcoin.
Cryptocurrency’s price soars after electric-vehicle maker says it soon expects to accept customer payments in bitcoin.
Tesla Inc. said Monday that it bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin, a disclosure that follows Chief Executive Elon Musk’s promotion of the cryptocurrency and other digital-currency alternatives on Twitter.
The electric-vehicle company also said it expects to start accepting bitcoin as payment for its products soon. Bitcoin prices jumped more than 10% after the announcement, according to cryptocurrency research and news site CoinDesk.
Tesla disclosed its bitcoin purchase in its latest annual report, saying the move aims to “diversify and maximize returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity.” Tesla said a board committee had approved changes to company rules on investments, adding that it can also invest cash in gold bullion and gold exchange-traded funds among other assets.
The bitcoin purchase, likely among the largest by a public company, comes after a rally in 2020 when the price more than quadrupled. Tesla is joining a handful of other companies that have disclosed bitcoin holdings. Software developer MicroStrategy Inc. acquired about $425 million worth of bitcoin last summer, and its CEO, Michael Saylor, has become an outspoken proponent.
Companies holding bitcoin in their treasuries face an accounting risk: Because bitcoin and other digital assets are considered “indefinite-lived intangible assets,” rather than currencies, any decrease in their value below what the company paid for them—even a temporary one—can force a company to write down the value, taking an impairment charge. MicroStrategy posted a net loss in the third quarter of 2020 because the price of bitcoin dropped temporarily in September.
Tesla said it would analyze its holdings in the cryptocurrency each quarter to see whether impairments are warranted based on bitcoin prices. “If we hold digital assets and their values decrease relative to our purchase prices, our financial condition may be harmed,” the company said.
Sharp changes in the digital currency’s valuation might be why companies have acquired millions, rather than billions, of dollars’ worth of the cryptocurrency, said Michel Rauchs, founder of Luxembourg-based digital-assets consulting firm Paradigma Sarl: “It is definitely greater risk but greater reward there.”
Bitcoin recently traded Monday at $43,602.68, according to CoinDesk. Its price averaged $34,730.12 in January and is currently more than eight times higher than bitcoin’s 2020 low of a little under $5,000.
Mr. Musk has shown growing interest in bitcoin in recent years, after tweeting in 2018 that the only cryptocurrency he owned was one-quarter of a bitcoin a friend had given him—which today would be worth more than $10,000. Around Jan. 29 the Tesla chief changed his Twitter biography to “#bitcoin,” which sent prices for it higher, before removing that reference.
“I think bitcoin is really on the verge of getting broad acceptance by sort of the conventional finance people,” he said last week on the social-networking app Clubhouse. Mr. Musk said he needed to be cautious with his public statements about cryptocurrencies because “some of these things can really move the market.”
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company said in its report that it updated its investment policy in January but didn’t disclose the exact timing of either its board decision or its bitcoin purchase.
“He’s already telegraphed it to the market,” said Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer at London-based asset management firm CoinShares, referring to Mr. Musk’s mentioning bitcoin in his Twitter biography. “One of the world’s largest corporations doing this—I think it opens the floodgates.”
Recently, Mr. Musk’s tweets about dogecoin, a cryptocurrency started as a joke in 2013, have helped drive up that virtual currency’s price.
Tesla has struggled to maintain cash while ramping up vehicle production, but its shares soared some 480% in the year ended Friday as investors piled into electric-vehicle makers and the company reported a string of quarterly profits. Tesla took advantage of that surge by selling billions of dollars in new stock, shoring up its cash position. The company’s cash holdings totalled around $19.4 billion at the end of last year, up from around $6.3 billion at the end of 2019.
Mr. Musk’s tweets have drawn regulatory scrutiny, including from the Securities and Exchange Commission over a 2018 post in which the CEO said he had secured funding to take Tesla private. Mr. Musk and the SEC later settled in a deal requiring the company to sign off on any written statements he made that could be deemed material. He has since mocked the regulator on Twitter.
The SEC is unlikely to challenge Mr. Musk over his bitcoin tweets, said John Coffee Jr., a Columbia University law professor who specializes in securities law, especially after a federal judge rebuked the commission when it sought to hold the CEO in contempt in 2019. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether Mr. Musk had sought approval for his bitcoin commentary.
Mr. Musk’s online remarks can move markets. After touting online shopping site Etsy Inc. in January, the stock rose more than 8% on the open. Shares in CD Projekt SA, the maker of the troubled Cyberpunk 2077 game, rose more than 15% after Mr. Musk praised the game. Both stocks retreated later. Last year, Mr. Musk tweeted that he thought Tesla’s share price was too high. The market agreed, and the stock fell before recovering.
An affinity for bitcoin seems a natural fit for Mr. Musk, who has bristled at government constraints. Last year he battled local authorities in California that ordered his lone U.S. car plant closed as part of broader measures to curb the pandemic. Mr. Musk reopened the facility after several weeks, daring authorities to arrest him. They didn’t.
Part of bitcoin’s appeal for some holders is that it isn’t circulated or controlled by a government or nation. Unlike opening up a bank account to store dollars, euros or yen, starting a bitcoin account doesn’t require providing identifying information. Bitcoin is effectively anonymous, and law enforcement can’t freeze a bitcoin account as they could a bank account.
Payments company Square Inc., which shares bitcoin advocate Jack Dorsey as its CEO with Twitter Inc., acquired about $50 million worth for its corporate treasury in October. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. acquired $100 million worth in December to hold in its general investment account.
Companies might have grown more optimistic about bitcoin after the March 2020 selloff, when it recovered faster than the broader stock market, said Joel Kruger, a currency strategist at LMAX Group.
The added wrinkle with Tesla is the plan to accept bitcoin from customers. Few companies now accept bitcoin directly as payment; Overstock.com Inc. is among the few that do. Some large companies experimented with bitcoin payments in 2014 and 2015, like Dell Technologies Inc. and Expedia Group Inc., but most later dropped it for lack of use.
While Tesla’s move would be high profile, a more substantial development is expected later this year, when PayPal Holdings Inc. plans to allow its customers to use their bitcoin holdings for payments.
Mr. Musk’s ties to the financial-services industry date to the 1990s, when he invested most of the $22 million he earned from the sale of an internet business into a new startup, X.com, that became PayPal. EBay Inc. bought PayPal for $1.4 billion in 2002.
As the largest shareholder, a 31-year-old Mr. Musk collected more than $100 million. He used the money to start Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the rocket company he also runs, as well as solar-cell company SolarCity, now part of Tesla.
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In the worlds of Hollywood, fashion and activism, there’s never been anyone quite like Salma.
I N THE COURSE of one conversation, Salma Hayek Pinault mourns the death of her pet rescue owl, reveals that she never signed a prenup in her marriage to French billionaire François-Henri Pinault and bemoans the obnoxiousness of certain wealthy people who assume they’re interesting just because they’re rich.
But ask about her typical day, and she has no words.
“Nothing in my life is typical,” she says, her smoky voice filling the low-ceilinged room in a London pub, where she shows up on an overcast Monday afternoon awash in head-to-toe Gucci and perfume drawn from ingredients that include Mexican tuberose and queen of the night, an opulent cactus with flowers that each bloom just once a year in the dark.
The Mexican-born actress, 58, famous for her curves and sultry accent, took the objectification of Salma Hayek and bent it to her will: She used her Hollywood clout to create roles for Latina women that defy ethnic stereotypes and channeled her influence into a decadeslong fight against domestic violence. She defied the odds to become one of a tiny handful of Latina leading ladies in the 1990s, and then, while working to preserve that status, developed parallel careers as a producer and a philanthropist.
“I’m talking with my mouth full,” she says after dipping some crust from a sourdough boule into melted rosemary and garlic Camembert, on-brand for a person who professes no strict fitness regimen. “Emotional intelligence,” she’s saying of the forces that drive her. “Human, real connection.”
She’s got a high-drama aura but she’s also pragmatic, a trait visible in her charity work. “I’m passionate,” she says, “but I’m a strategist.” In just three years, Hayek Pinault has turned the Kering Foundation’s annual fundraising dinner in New York, Caring for Women, into a mini Met Gala. The event sponsored by her husband’s luxury goods company Kering sprang fully formed onto the fashion circuit—it wasn’t a slow-building phenomenon like the behemoth Met Gala—and in many ways it’s an expression of Hayek Pinault herself. Every detail runs through her for a gathering that, while raising roughly $3 million, brings attention to the fight against gender-based violence.
As a charity hostess, who on red carpets often appears bejewelled like a modern Elizabeth Taylor, she has curated her own group of tastemakers with guests including Jessica Chastain, Leonardo DiCaprio and Viola Davis.
“She gets you on board,” says friend Eva Longoria, “and she doesn’t take no for undefined an answer.”
I T’S TEMPTING to think of Hayek Pinault’s story as a rags-to-riches tale: The young actress from a small town in southern Mexico gets cast in the leading role on a telenovela and leapfrogs to stardom. In fact, she came from a wealthy family in the coastal city of Coatzacoalcos. Her father was an oil executive of Lebanese descent, her mother an opera singer with Spanish roots, and she grew up with four live-in maids. She saw Europe as a 2-year-old and traveled by private jet. She loved her pet bobcat.
After she moved to L.A. in her mid-20s, her father lost his fortune, Hayek Pinault says. She was a struggling actress with the stress of supporting herself and her family back in Mexico. “That’s when I became the best version of myself,” she says.
In Hollywood, studios first saw her accent as a liability. But director Robert Rodriguez cast her in the 1995 drug-crime western Desperado , followed a year later by his cult hit From Dusk Till Dawn , where she dances with a huge yellow python slung around her shoulders and sticks her toes in Quentin Tarantino’s mouth. Her breakthrough came in 1997 with Fools Rush In , a shotgun-marriage rom-com co-starring Matthew Perry.
With her success came Hollywood money. But her finances leapt into another dimension with her 2009 marriage to Pinault, the chief executive of Kering, a corporate giant that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and other major luxury brands. The reality of marrying into extreme wealth surprised her.
“To me, the excitement about having a lot of money was that I didn’t have to think about money, and it turned out all people wanted to talk to me about was money,” she says of her life after joining the Pinault family. “Strangers coming to me that aren’t even friends, but they think we should be friends because they’re rich, too.”
She and Pinault keep their finances separate, she says, and there’s no prenuptial agreement dividing assets. The more she thinks about it lately, she says, the more she’d like to increase her own net worth.
“I support a lot of the aspects of my life and myself,” she says. “I have the pressure to make a certain amount of money, and I like it. And now, I decided, I want to make more.”
With their 17-year-old daughter, Valentina, on the cusp of adulthood, Hayek Pinault is pursuing business ideas, which she isn’t ready to reveal. Pinault likes this ambition, she says. “I think he finds it kind of sexy.”
ONE ATTRIBUTE that’s made Hayek Pinault famous is her body. Much has been made of her breasts: Talk-show hosts ask her questions about them, her movie characters comment on them, her red-carpet fashions flaunt them. During our interview, when I say I want to ask her a trivia question, she assumes I’m after her bra size.
No, I tell her in a total left turn, I want to learn about the time on the Frida movie set when her monkey co-star bit her, specifically where it bit her. Coincidentally, I’d just gotten a video of a monkey bite in a group chat so I thought I’d show Hayek Pinault a screenshot. It was a picture of a raised pink welt on pale skin—actually a bite on a man’s back—but Hayek Pinault assumed it was an R-rated close-up of a topless woman.
“It is a thing about the boobs,” she scolds when she sees the photo. I explain she’s looking at a monkey bite on a man’s back. “Oh. This isn’t a monkey bite in the boobs?” she asks. No, I tell her, but is she saying that’s where the monkey bit her? No, she replies. This is turning into a who’s-on-first of monkey bites and lady parts. “Can I tell you something?” she says, clutching her breasts with both hands, still horrified by the photo. “My nipples began to hurt when I saw that.”
It turns out, the Frida monkey bit her on the right hand between her thumb and forefinger, and she needed rabies shots. I asked if those were painful and she said, “Yes, yes. Stop it.” She and the monkey, whose name was Tyson, were alone in her trailer, and he started throwing all her CDs at the walls and breaking them. They got into a tug-of-war over a disc, and he bit her. “They should have told me the monkey has been possessed by the devil,” she says.
Frida was her passion project, a major moment for her now 25-year-old production company, Ventanarosa—Spanish for “pink window”—and a big learning opportunity for her. It had been a fight for her to control the material. In one meeting, while trying to wrest back the project from a studio she’d decided against, she had her agent’s attorney friend come as a prop to intimidate executives. “You sit there, nod your head, look mean,” she told him.
The strategy worked. The project was ultimately made at Miramax, the studio co-founded by Harvey Weinstein. Later, she would write a searing op-ed about being sexually harassed by Weinstein.
Hayek Pinault described in the piece having to film a “senseless” full-frontal nude love scene with another woman to placate Weinstein so he wouldn’t block the completion of Frida . Hayek Pinault, distraught over Weinstein’s tactics, vomited for the length of the shoot.
In a statement, Weinstein’s spokesman says “he apologises to Ms. Hayek for ever making her feel sad or uncomfortable.” He says that Weinstein has “a different memory of those times but isn’t looking to talk about them.”
The roughly $12 million film went on to gross $56 million worldwide and made Hayek Pinault one of the first Latinas ever to be nominated for a best actress Oscar.
With Ugly Betty , an American version of a popular Colombian telenovela, Hayek Pinault initially met resistance from ABC, she says. The actress personally presold international rights and advertising to prove the show’s worth. The series, which supercharged the career of actress America Ferrera, was considered a risk partly because it featured a Latina lead who was not Hollywood’s idea of universal beauty. Hayek Pinault pushed back when some executives wanted to give Betty a makeover. “It got really heated,” she says. Ferrera went on to win the Emmy for best actress in a comedy in 2007.
Most of Ventanarosa’s film and TV works are in Spanish and do not feature Hayek Pinault. Recent titles include the 2019 TV series Monarca , a Succession -style drama on Netflix about a family’s tequila empire, and the Spanish-language HBO series Like Water for Chocolate , premiering this fall. Separately, she continues her own work as an actress, recently premiering the Angelina Jolie–directed wartime film Without Blood at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Hayek Pinault’s longtime producing partner, José “Pepe” Tamez, says the two have been looking at shows like Squid Game , the blockbuster Korean series, to get Latinos in front of a worldwide audience in a similar way. The company had focused on the U.S. and Latin American markets for years, but now they’re thinking more globally. That’s where the opportunity is, Tamez says.
In pitch meetings, Hayek Pinault’s ability to read her audience has been a secret weapon. “Maybe this has to do with the fact that she’s an actress,” Tamez says. “She knows how to listen.”
HAYEK PINAULT’S WORK as a producer did not inform her philanthropy, she says: Her philanthropy made her a better producer.
Her interest in volunteering began in childhood, and her efforts fighting violence against women stretch back to her early days in 2004 working with the Avon Foundation. On a 2009 Unicef trip to Sierra Leone, she famously breast-fed another woman’s baby, a newborn the same age as her own daughter, to combat a regional stigma around breast-feeding. The moment was captured on camera for ABC’s Nightline .
Pinault was keenly interested in her philanthropy. Once when the two were dating and she was volunteering in South America, he asked on the phone about her day. “I said, ‘Oh, it was great. We were with the prostitutes all morning in the red-light district,’ ” she recalls. She talked for an hour, then asked about his day. “He said, ‘I’m embarrassed to tell you what was my day.’ ”
In 2008, a year before they married, the couple began working together to build the Kering Foundation, which Pinault had created to focus on women’s causes.
Over time, Hayek Pinault realised she could broaden her reach even further. In 2013, she and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter founded Gucci Chime for Change, a global campaign by the Kering brand to promote gender equality.
For her signature event, the Caring for Women dinner and charity auction in New York, Hayek Pinault keeps the scope small. The evening’s 200 guests can see each other at 20 tables around a cozy room. For an event that kicks out press, it gets a ton. This year and last, Lauren Sánchez, who is engaged to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, got in a tabloid-perfect bidding war with Kim Kardashian over a Balenciaga couture lot.
Last year, Hayek Pinault adorned the space with plants and played bird sound effects. She personally wrote fellow celebrities to make sure they’d come. Before they arrived, she lit copal, a rock incense used in Mexican rituals, and waved it around for spiritual cleansing.
“My spirit,” she says, “wants to micromanage.”
O N THIS DAY at the pub, Hayek Pinault is mourning the death of Kering, a rescue owl who became famous on her Instagram. A fox got into the aviary on the grounds of their London estate and ate Kering not long ago. The owl slept in her bedroom many nights, though not that evening. “We had our own way of communicating,” Hayek Pinault says. “She would hold my hand and play and try to pull me.” Kering was a pet but also a wild animal. “I never took that owl in if she didn’t want to come in,” she says. The actress knows her owl would have been eaten by a predator long ago if she’d lived in nature. “She had a good life,” she says.
Over the past decade, Hayek Pinault has dealt with losses like this and life’s other challenges by practicing meditation.
A session might take three hours. She knows a meditation DJ who plays music while she lets go in her mindfulness space, which is the smallest room in her house. Sometimes she’s dancing. She’s usually blindfolded, which makes standing on her head tricky. The DJ later debriefs her because she loses herself so completely that she can’t always recall what’s just happened. She finds herself accomplishing physical feats she could never achieve otherwise. She is sparing on details. “I do strange things,” she says.
In the meditation sessions, nothing hurts, she feels elastic in body and spirit. “I’m ready to go in a room wanting nothing and not knowing what to do or what you’re supposed to do—surrendering and understanding your instincts,” she says. “It’s very advanced.”
Like much in Hayek Pinault’s world, the practice is unconventional. “It’s completely the opposite of no pain, no gain,” she says. “It’s completely the opposite of what everyone does.”
Hair, Nao Kawakami; makeup, Wendy Rowe; manicure, Kate Williamson; set design, Max Bellhouse and Tilly Power; production, Bellhouse.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.