Four Reasons Elon Musk’s Tesla May Have Moved $760M of Bitcoin
2024-10-17

Elon Musk-controlled Tesla TTSLA created ripples earlier this week as it moved over $750 million worth of bitcoin {{BTC}} to new wallets after nearly two years of the stash being untouched.
The action sparked conversation around Tesla's/Musk's intentions and concerns of further selling pressure.
The electric carmaker as of the time of the move roughly 40 hours ago was the fourth-largest corporate holder of bitcoin, BitcoinTreasuries data showed, with about 10,000 tokens. Tesla accumulated its holdings in 2021 and sold a sizable chunk amid the 2022 bear market.
Available data from Arkham Intelligence on the Wednesday move showed the BTC was transferred to new wallets and not to any exchange, alleviating early fears of a sizable sale. Tesla or Musk are yet to publicly comment on the movement, though more detail may come early next week when the company reports its third quarter earnings results.
The reason(s) for now are limited to speculation and they range from wallet management to restructuring, CryptoQuant community analyst Maartunn told CoinDesk in a Telegram interview on Thursday:
Another possible reason getting some social media chatter could be the consolidation of UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs) - i.e., the process of combining multiple UTXOs into one or fewer UTXOs. A UTXO can be considered as individual, unspent amounts of any token waiting to be used in future transactions.
Each UTXO used in a transaction increases the transaction size, which can lead to higher fees because miners charge based on the data size of the transaction. Consolidating leads to fewer inputs for future transactions, potentially reducing the cost and increasing the speed of a larger transaction in the future.