Elon Musk’s SpaceX holds 8,285 Bitcoin, valued at about $851M

American aerospace company SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, holds 8,285 Bitcoin valued at approximately $851 million, according to data from Arkham Intelligence. The firm has reportedly earned $700 million in profits from its Bitcoin investments since 2022.

On Friday, blockchain data analytics firm Arkham confirmed that SpaceX’s BTC holdings had grown in value by $695.24 million since November 29, 2022. As confirmed by market activity, the Bitcoin stash, which the company reportedly keeps on Coinbase Prime, hasn’t been touched in the last three years.

The data also shows that in the last year, the reserves have garnered a net profit of more than 130%, buoyed by Bitcoin’s rise past $100,000 after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the US elections in November.

Elon Musk-led companies’ Bitcoin balance sheet history

According to a report published on the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX first recorded $373 million in Bitcoin holdings on its balance sheet in 2021. By the end of the year, which coincided with a market bull run, the company held 25.6k BTC, when the coin was priced at $46,000 per coin.

In May 2022, the company sold approximately $450 million worth of the crypto at a loss, as BTC’s price had slumped to $20,000. The aerospace giant then decided to hold onto its remaining Bitcoin reserves, which now stand at about 8.9k coins.

Electric car manufacturer Tesla, another one of Musk’s companies that is closely linked with SpaceX’s crypto strategy, had its BTC holdings firstly spotted in March 2024 through Arkham’s on-chain analysis .

Reuters cited a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that revealed Tesla acquired $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in January 2021. During the year, for about three months, the company briefly accepted BTC payments for its vehicles.

Tesla sold portions of its portfolio twice: first in 2021 and again during the 2022 bear market, unloading $936 million worth of Bitcoin as the asset’s price dipped below $40,000. As of the time of this writing, Tesla holds about 11.5k coins, valued at just over $1.1 billion, per Arkham monitoring.

The car manufacturer’s acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment method ended in May 2021, with Musk resonating the halt to environmental concerns about the crypto’s mining process. 

“We are concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk stated on X.

Stablecoins streamline SpaceX’s global operations

In other news, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said that SpaceX converts payments for its Starlink satellite internet services into stablecoins to avoid foreign exchange risks. 

Speaking in an All-In podcast on YouTube in December, Palihapitiya explained that the company employs this strategy primarily in countries with underdeveloped traditional financial systems. 

“When they aggregate payments in long-tail countries, they don’t want to take the foreign exchange risk or deal with sending wires,” he narrated, “ Stablecoins would allow us to chip away all of this decrepit infrastructure that the banks use to sort of slow down and tax a process that should never have been taxed.”

Palihapitiya advocated for stablecoins as a primary cross-border transaction method in the US, because they would charge far less compared to traditional finance entities like Stripe.

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