Elon Musk Says SpaceX Holds Bitcoin at 'B Word' Conference

Elon Musk's love-hate affair with various cryptocurrency communities continues apace as he shared more details about his and his companies' holdings at The B Word, a conference held Wednesday.

One of his privately held ventures, aerospace company SpaceX, holds BTC, Musk said. SpaceX's bitcoin holdings had not been previously disclosed.

The entrepreneur and provocateur said he personally owns bitcoin, ether and, naturally, dogecoin.

Publicly traded automaker Tesla, whose BTC bags were revealed in February, still holds the asset in its treasury, the CEO said.

The bitcoin price jumped Wednesday by the most since mid-June. At one point, the largest cryptocurrency was changing hands around $32,800, up more than 10% over the past 24 hours, but later pared those gains to about 6%.

According to Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, bitcoin’s price rise earlier on Wednesday was partly on anticipation of the event.

“As we await what promises to be the greatest-ever bitcoin livestream, it’s clear that the market is already very excited,” Greenspan wrote in his daily newsletter. At its peak, Dogecoin was up 19% on Wednesday to about 20 cents.

On Tesla accepting bitcoin for car payments again, Musk said the network's energy usage is improving and Tesla is doing some more due diligence on this, but that Tesla would "most likely" resume accepting BTC for payments. The price of bitcoin fell sharply after Musk first announced in May that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as payment for its products because of concerns over the amount of energy used to mine it.

Musk also asked fellow conference participant Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, whether he would consider accepting bitcoin as payment from Twitter’s advertisers as a way to support the cryptocurrency.

Dorsey replied that he agreed with the concept but that he was more focused on creating “economic incentives in the network itself without having to rely on advertising.”

When Musk pressed him for an answer of whether he would actually allow advertisers to pay with bitcoin; however, Dorsey laughed and stopped short of committing to do it right away.

And on the subject of his favorite crypto dogecoin, about which he often tweets, Musk said he likes that the DOGE community is very irreverent and “has great memes and loves dogs, and I love dogs and memes.”

“The most ironic and entertaining outcome would be the the cryptocurrency that was started as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies ends up being the leading cryptocurrency,” Musk said, chuckling.

Dogecoin pared its gains later in the day and was up approximately 10% to just under 19 cents over the last 24 hours.

UPDATE (July 21, 20:04 UTC): This story was updated to reflect additional comments from Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, as well as comments from Musk about dogecoin.