The Market is Hungry for Uncomplicated Narratives
Technical details don’t seem to matter.
With its $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin, analysts estimate that Tesla is “on a trajectory to make more from its Bitcoin investments than profits from selling its EV (electric vehicle) cars in all of 2020.” However it is ironic that Tesla, whose mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, is benefiting from a cryptocurrency that has a carbon footprint comparable to that of New Zealand.
But the association worked anyway.
On the surface, a digital currency like Bitcoin seems like a natural progression for the brand that is pioneering the digital transformation of the automobile industry. Matt Levine echoed this perceptual correlation in his newsletter. “My rough sense is that Tesla is pretty correlated to Bitcoin anyway, in that a future where Bitcoin is valuable is also likely a future where Tesla is valuable, though my model for that correlation is vague, some sort of electricity-plus-being-extremely-online connection.”
The marriage between Bitcoin and Tesla seems to create such a plausible narrative that the environmental inconsistency appears like a jarring glitch that also requires expensing some cognitive energy.
