Tesla, SpaceX Hold $1.3B in Bitcoin: Arkham

Blockchain analysis platform Arkham said on-chain fund flows it has identified match financial statements from Tesla and SpaceX.

"We believe Tesla currently holds 11.51K BTC ($780M) across 68 addresses, and SpaceX holds 8.29K BTC ($560M) across 28 addresses," Arkham said in an update on X on Thursday.

Has Elon Been Shopping?

In Tesla's most recent earnings call in late January, the company said it held 9,720 BTC on its balance sheet. This figure is 1,789 BTC lower than the 11,509 BTC in the wallets identified by Arkham.

As the company has not commented on the numbers, it is not known if Tesla has simply been adding to its stash of Bitcoin recently, or whether it is an accounting error.

Arkham, launched in 2023, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to deanonymize the blockchain and on-chain data by matching them with real-world entities.

The bounty to find addresses associated with Tesla's current or previous Bitcoin holdings was worth 1019.5 ARKM, or about $2,890 at time of writing.

Tesla purchased $1.5B of BTC in Jan 2021, and sold BTC on 2 occasions: $272M BTC in Q1 2021, and $936M BTC in Q2 2022. Tesla allowed purchases of Teslas in Bitcoin between March 24 and May 12 2021.

"Our Tesla Intel Exchange Bounty revealed a Tesla car purchase linked to this larger cluster of Tesla holdings," Arkham said.

Privacy Debate

Arkham calls itself "the world's first on-chain intelligence exchange," but critics have labeled Arkham's mission as a "snitch-to-earn" program, arguing that it could potentially serve as a centralized intelligence agency.

There are also concerns about the potential misuse of the bounty marketplace model. Critics argue that it could be exploited by large-scale investors to manipulate the market.