Liam Denning, Columnist

Buying Teslas With Bitcoin Sort of Defeats the Purpose of Teslas

Melding the electric-car maker’s fortunes with the energy-intensive cryptocurrency undercuts its purported mission.

March 29, 2021 at 7:00 AM EDT

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Greener when purchased with dollars.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe

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Tesla Inc. has begun accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicles in the U.S. This could be a clever marketing strategy, a way of bolstering the value of the company’s own crypto-bet, or perhaps just something to do. Maybe it’s all three. One thing it isn’t: compatible with Tesla’s green credentials.

“Mining” Bitcoin is energy intensive. The computers competing to log and verify the transactions underpinning, and securing, the cryptocurrency demand electricity — currently as much as used by the entirety of Finland, according to one estimate.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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