Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, wants to be paid in bitcoin

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla

TSLA
and SpaceX, which has just become the richest man in the world, said it would never refuse payment in the growing bitcoin cryptocurrency.

Responding to a tweet from Ben Mezrich, the author of the film The social network and writer of Bitcoin Billionaires, which said “I will never refuse payment in bitcoin again”, Musk answered: “Me neither.”

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Musk, who raised Tesla’s share price to the top of the world’s richest lists last year, is known to be a bitcoin fan, tweeting regularly about this and other cryptocurrencies (though often ironically).

With the price of bitcoin reaching levels never seen before in the past month, bitcoin and similar digital currencies have returned to the forefront of global consciousness for the first time since the bitcoin boom in 2017 and the subsequent fall.

The combined market value of bitcoins and cryptocurrencies has now reached over $ 1 trillion. The price of bitcoin reached $ 40,000 per bitcoin this week, with the total value of the world’s largest cryptocurrency going over $ 750 billion – and pushing bitcoin up on the charts of the biggest global assets.

The price of bitcoin, after suffering a three-year drop in the market, started to rise in October – invading new territory last month with a wave of big investors named bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation.

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In December, Musk sparked speculation that his electric car company might add bitcoin to its balance sheet during a public exchange on Twitter.

Musk, responding to MicroStrategy’s chief executive

MSTR

MSTR
, a business intelligence company that has attracted significant attention in recent months by buying more than $ 1 billion in bitcoin, asked if it was possible to convert billions of Tesla dollars into bitcoin.

A week later, Musk, who wants to make a manned mission to Mars a reality in just a few years, tweeted that the future Mars economy could be based on cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin.