The price of bitcoin fell below $50,000 Thursday morning after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted a day earlier that the electric car maker would stop accepting the digital currency as payment for its vehicles.
Musk on Wednesday cited environmental concerns for the change in policy.
“We are concerned about rapid increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst
emissions of any fuel,” Musk said on Twitter. He added that cryptocurrency is a “good idea on many levels” but its promise cannot come at a “great cost to the environment.”
He also said that Tesla won’t be selling any of the Bitcoin it owns.
The price of bitcoin slipped to $49,880 in morning trading Thursday, the first time it’s been below $50,000 since early March. Tesla shares were poised for gains early Thursday after falling 4.4% on Wednesday.
Tesla said in February that it had invested around $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and it planned to begin accepting the digital currency as payment “soon”. The fair market value of Tesla’s Bitcoin holdings as of March 31 was $2.48 billion, according to securities filings.
Bitcoin relies on computers, which rely on electricity, to exist.
