Tesla and SpaceX CEO says he owns “literally zero cryptocurrency” in response to Twitter scams involving his fake accounts promising crypto donations.
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and entrepreneur known for founding and leading Tesla Motors and SpaceX, revealed on Twitter Thursday Feb. 22, how much Bitcoin (BTC) he owns — 0.25 BTC or about $2,478 as of press time, or 0.000012% of his total net worth.
Musk’s cryptocurrency holdings reveal comes after a number of fake accounts posing to be various well-known figures, including Musk, cropped up on Twitter promising crypto donations to those who send them crypto.
On Feb. 22 a Twitter user concerned about the scam accounts asked Musk in a tweet “why is all the spam popping up lately?”
Not sure. I let @jack know, but it’s still going. I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2018
Musk responded that he had already reported the issue to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to no avail. Evidently as a way of explaining his surprise at the multiple scams, Musk noted in the same tweet that apart from the 0.25 BTC a friend had given to him “many years ago”, he “literally own[s] zero cryptocurrency.”
The Bitcoin sum he reports to own is indeed an extremely small fraction of Musk’s total net worth, which stands at $21.4 billion as of Feb. 24.
In November 2017, Musk denied rumors suggested by former SpaceX intern Sahil Gupta that Musk was probably Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary anonymous creator of Bitcoin.
As Cointelegraph reported Feb. 21, a cloud security firm recently reported that Tesla’s non-password protected Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) software container had been hacked to mine cryptocurrency over an as yet unknown period of time.
