A German joker claims he was behind a mysterious Reddit post last month, which apparently predicted that Tesla’s flashy bitcoin purchase was this week – and that he was on LSD when he did so, The Post reported. heard.
Tesla stunned Wall Street on Monday when it revealed it had acquired $ 1.5 billion in bitcoin to “further diversify and maximize” the cash on its balance sheet. Tesla said it also plans to accept the cryptocurrency as a payment option for its electric cars.
Not long after the surprise announcement, attention was drawn to a January 2 message from a Reddit user called ‘TSLAinsider’ claiming he had a good hint about Tesla’s move to the cryptocurrency market.
“You first heard it here – our company only bought $ 800 million,” the five-week-old reported. The user claims to be ” a software developer working at R & D in Tesla, California ”, adding that the Elon Musk-led company bought 24,701 bitcoin at an average price of $ 33 142 ‘the last 72 hours.’
The report seemed like such a prediction of Tesla’s bitcoin investment that financial news outlets, including Reuters and Bloomberg, took up this week.
But in an interview with The Post, Hendrik, the 24-year-old political science student behind the TSLAinsider account, said he held the position while celebrating high tide on LSD during the holidays.
“If you want to know the truth: I’m a young German guy and was Acid while doing this post last month,” the user said in an email to The Post on Tuesday. ‘I had this afflatus that Elon was going to buy Bitcoin, so I created this troll post. And now all the newspapers all over the world are writing about it, it’s quite funny and scary to be honest. ”
Hendrik, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he got an intuition that Tesla would invest in Bitcoin after seeing a Twitter exchange in December between Musk and Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, whose business intelligence firm bought more than $ 1 billion worth. the digital currency last year.
“Me and my girlfriend, we took acid, and I saw the conversation between Michael Saylor and Elon Musk on Twitter, and I was like, yeah, why wouldn’t he buy bitcoin?” Hendrik told The Post in a Tuesday Zoom interview from Germany. “He’s crazy and he has a lot of money, so why not?”
Hendrik gave The Post a screenshot showing how he signed in to the TSLAinsider Reddit account, which triumphantly posted ‘I TOLD YOU SO’ after the announcement of Tesla’s market-moving Monday.
His initial message – which initially received no comment from other users – was doubtful enough that moderators of the Reddit forum dedicated to Tesla shares, according to Hendrik, removed it.
It also does not fully align with Tesla’s government documents on Monday, which say the company bought Bitcoin after changing its investment policy in January. The 72-hour purchases would have to start during the last days of December if the timeline of TSLAinsider was accurate.
Hendrik said he was not otherwise active on Reddit, but he decided to take a stroll on the site because “everyone goes to Reddit to troll people.” However, he is an active investor in Bitcoin and has been since he was a teenager, he says.
“I think it’s part of the technology of the future,” Hendrik said, praising Musk for getting Tesla into the Bitcoin game.
“He opened the door for other companies to do the same, as they all want to be like Elon,” he added.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.