Tesla has already profited more from buying $ 1.5 billion bitcoins than car sales in 2020: Wedbush

Elon Musk’s electric car company is expected to profit more from its Bitcoin investment made in January than of all of its car sales throughout the year 2020, according to a note from the American research firm Wedbush Securities.

Tesla announced earlier this month that it bought $ 1.5 billion in Bitcoin in January. Following Tesla’s disclosure, Bitcoins the price soared like one of the rockets of Musk’s other company, SpaceX. Moments after the news broke, Bitcoin’s price jumped 8.5%.

And Bitcoin continued to grow: 12 days later, Bitcoin exceeded $ 57,000, ensuring a market capitalization just north of $ 1 trillion.

Wedbush analysts Dan Ives and Strecker Backe estimate that Tesla has already made $ 1 billion in profit from its investment in Bitcoin; compare that to the $ 721 million in profit that Tesla reported in its fiscal year 2020. (This assumes that Tesla has not yet sold any bitcoin it bought in January.)

Musk helped Bitcoin’s price by tweeting about it to its 47.5 million followers. When he changed his Twitter bio to “# Bitcoin #”, the price of Bitcoin increased by 13% in an hour. Musk also defended the currency against critics. When the gold bug and Bitcoin critic, Peter Schiff, who runs the Euro Pacific Bank, tweeted that gold was superior to cryptography, Musk disagreed, tweeting, “An email saying you have gold is not the same as having gold. You can also have encryption.”

Wedbush calls the Bitcoin investment a “Tesla side show”, but also thinks it could “have a ripple impact” for public companies in the next year and a half.

Even so, the company predicts that less than 5% of public companies will copy Tesla’s Bitcoin investment “until more regulatory target posts are put in place around the cryptography Marketplace.”

Wedbush remains optimistic that cryptography “will have a seismic impact on blockchain, payments, banks and semis in the coming years. ”