Bitcoin took an 3.7% drop to near $45,100 Sunday afternoon EST after Tesla CEO Elon Musk did not outright deny that his electric-car company has sold or could soon sell all of its more than $1 billion holdings of bitcoin (BTC, -7.6%) because of the criticism he’s received after suspending the world’s largest cryptocurrency as a form of payment.
Indeed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2021
“Indeed,” Musk tweeted at 2:48 p.m. EST in a response to a tweet by Twitter handle @CryptoWhale, which said that “Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings.”
Bitcoin’s price dropped immediately after the tweet, to near $45,100 and eventually sank to as low as $44,459.02 before recovering.
In recent trading, bitcoin had bounced back a bit to $45,627.90, down 4.98% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk 20.
Earlier the day, Musk also tweeted at Peter McCormack, who posted a Twitter thread about Musk’s criticism of bitcoin and support for dogecoin (DOGE, -4.6%), saying that “obnoxious threads like this make me want to go all in on Doge.”
