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Elon Musk Just Revealed the Surprising Amount of Bitcoin He Owns

By:
Sarah Gray
2 min read
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives at the 2017 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Graydon Carter at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 26, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. - Axelle—Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives at the 2017 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Graydon Carter at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 26, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. Axelle—Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk — man whose name is synonymous with boundary-pushing companies like Tesla and SpaceX — just revealed how much Bitcoin he owns. And it's not a lot.

"I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago," Musk said in a tweet on Thursday. That's about $2,552.42 as of Friday afternoon (Bitcoin values fluctuate constantly). Musk, by contrast, is worth $21.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

Musk's tweet was in response to a Twitter user asking why there were so many spammers impersonating Musk with cryptocurrency scams.

"What's with all the ETH spam?" a user asked, referring to the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

"Not sure," Musk responded. "I let [Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter] know, but it's still going."

Twitter handles that resemble famous people, like Musk or even President Donald Trump, scam people out of their cryptocurrencies, BuzzFeed reported earlier this month.

The following example was shared by BuzzFeed:

'I’m donating 250 BITCOIN! to the BTC community!' @ElonMuski tweeted Thursday in a reply to the billionaire’s real Twitter account. 'First 250 transactions with 0.2 BTC sent to the address below will receive 1.0 BTC in the address the 0.2 BTC came from!'

Note the name @ElonMuski, with the added "i" at the end.

"We're aware of this form of manipulation and are proactively implementing a number of signals to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner," Twitter told BuzzFeed in a statement.

Bitcoin, the first blockchain currency, skyrocketed at the end of 2017, hitting a high of $19,850. It is currently worth around $10,180.60, according to Coindesk. For cryptocurrency novices interested in investing, here's an excellent primer.

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