The renowned aerospace technology company SpaceX is said to have written down the value of its Bitcoin assets by a total of $373 million in 2021 and 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal report from August 17. Although it is still unknown whether all $373 million worth of SpaceX’s Bitcoin was liquidated, the story makes the assumption that the company may have sold all of its Bitcoin.
After looking through the company’s financial records, The Wall Street Journal estimated that SpaceX’s spending in 2022 came to about $5.2 billion. In addition, the business spent $5.4 billion on property, equipment, research, and development in 2021 and 2022.
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, had declared in public that the company had acquired a specific quantity of Bitcoin in 2021. This declaration came after a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that showed Tesla, another business created by Musk, intended to spend $1.5 billion buying the cryptocurrency. This action most likely contributed to Bitcoin hitting a record high price of almost $43,000 at the time.
Tesla liquidated all but $184 million of its Bitcoin assets, according to the company’s second-quarter 2023 earnings report. Particularly, Tesla liquidated about 30,000 BTC in the second quarter of 2022, totaling over $936 million, or about 75% of its initial $1.5 billion Bitcoin investment.
Within ten minutes of the news being published, there was a sharp decline in the price of Bitcoin of about 10%, bringing its value on Binance to $25,166. Even lower, at $24,098, was the OKX perpetual bitcoin price. Some Twitter users have connected this price decline to news of SpaceX’s Bitcoin write-down and likely sale. Some people have attributed the decrease to outside reasons, such as the filing of China’s Evergrande Group for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York and an apparent bearish pattern in technical analysis of the price of bitcoin.