Tesla Motors announced this morning that part of its balance sheet has been allocated to Bitcoin. Less than two hours have passed, and the market capitalization of the crypto asset briefly exceeded that of the automaker itself.
Bitcoin (BTC) had a market cap of $ 807,869,728,188 for a short time today, according to data from AssetDash, outperforming Tesla at $ 807,829,441,685. Bitcoin ranked seventh on the list after the announcement. Both Tesla and BTC were comfortably above Facebook’s market cap at $ 765 billion.
The big flippening came this morning when news broke that Tesla had purchased a total of $ 1.5 billion in Bitcoin to keep as an investment and store of value for its excess cash. Following the announcement, the price of BTC rose to a new all-time high of more than $ 44,000 before falling to $ 43,202. Tesla’s share price rose more than 2% as markets opened, and was at $ 871.43 at the time of publication.
Bloomberg Intelligence strategist Mike McGlone recently predicted that this Tesla investment could be the catalyst needed to push Bitcoin’s market cap above $ 1 trillion for the first time. The total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies reached this level early last month when the price of BTC, Ether (ETH) and many Altcoins rose.
