The former idea is ridiculous - so the "Techno King of Tesla" (his choice of title, not mine) took months to learn that proof-of-work crypto produces a lot of CO²? Please...

As for the latter, I doubt that to be the case with a person who allegedly acts like this: "If you said something wrong or made one mistake or rubbed him the wrong way, he would decide you’re an idiot and there was nothing that could change his mind." [0]

> Tesla is a 568 billion market cap company. The profit it made on Bitcoin doesn't move the needle enough to justify some elaborate scheme to pump and dump.

Excuse me? Tesla's Q1 net income was $438M, $101M of which the company attributed to selling crypto [1], that's a whopping 23% of their net profits. I'd say that's "moving the needle" quite a bit indeed.

YMMV of course, but I'd like to think that close to a quarter of net income is quite substantial.

[0] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7977370/elon-musk-fired-hundre...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/26/tesla-tsla-earnings-q1-2021-...