It appears a Tesla employee had loose lips and revealed the company’s recent investment in Bitcoin on Reddit—back in January.
A user by the name of ‘TSLAinsider’ posted, “You heard it here first – our company just bought 800M$ USD worth of Bitcoin,” sharing the info on the r/bitcoin and r/TSLA subreddits, but the latter seeing mods axe the post.
“I am a software dev working at R&D at Tesla in California, over the past 72 hours our company bought 24701 BTC at an average price of 33142$,” said the Redditor, adding, “I have no idea what will happen once this reaches the newspapers but I think the price will explode even more.”
Now, following Tesla’s announcement of its $1.5 billion USD investment in Bitcoin shared on Monday, numerous Redditors have started to follow up on the post by ‘TSLAinsider’, reports Reuters.
When Redditors asked questions to ‘TSLAinsider’, the user just trolled users by replying with a YouTube link to Rick Astley’s ‘Never gonna give you up’, or known as getting ‘Rick Rolled’.
“I told you so,” ‘TSLAinsider’ wrote Monday on Reddit. “I got laughed at and downvoted.”
It’s unclear if ‘TSLAinsider’ is an actual Tesla employee, or someone who just happened to guess right based on CEO Elon Musk and his current support for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin sent the cryptocurrency surging, currently trading at $46,833.40 per ‘coin’, up over 9% for the day. The company says it will soon start accepting Bitcoin for payment.
Update: As suspected, the story turned out to be a total prank, according to the NY Post:
“If you want to know the truth: I am a young German guy and I was on Acid while I did this post in the last month,” the user told The Post in an email on Tuesday. “I had this afflatus that Elon is going to buy Bitcoin, so I created this trollpost. And now all the newspapers around the globe are writing about it, its kinda funny and scary to be honest.”
