Bitcoin Back Up Above $40,000 On Account Of Elon Musk's Tweet

Bitcoin jumped above $39,000 after Elon Musk said Tesla would resume transactions with the cryptocurrency when mining is done with more sustainable energy.

The electric-car maker will begin to accept Bitcoin transactions again “when there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend,” Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, tweeted.

His tweet was in reply to a tweeted report by Cointelegraph, citing Magda Wierzycka, executive chair of South African asset manager Sygnia, who said Musk’s recent tweets on Bitcoin should have prompted an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The cryptocurrency gained as much as 9.3% to $39,372 on Sunday afternoon, the highest level since June 3 and just below the $40,000 round-number level seen as key by some chart watchers. Although it went down about 1% to $38,888 much later, it has picked up the pace and is now trading for $40,675.

Musk has sent the prices of Bitcoin and other digital tokens spiralling in the past few months. In February, his electric-vehicle company, Tesla, announced it had bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and declared its intent to start accepting the digital coin as payment for vehicles. In March, Musk tweeted, “you can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin,” only to return on that statement in May that Bitcoin payments were suspended due to environmental concerns relating to fossil-fuel usage for Bitcoin mining and transactions.

Bitcoin prices were also helped by software company and major bitcoin-backer MicroStrategy (MSTR.O) raising half a billion dollars to buy bitcoin, said Bobby Ong, co-founder of crypto analytics website CoinGecko. 

Bitcoin is up about 40% this year but has collapsed from a record peak above $60,000 amid a regulatory crackdown in China and Musk's apparently wavering enthusiasm for it. Tesla (TSLA.O) stock is down about 30% since the company's bitcoin purchase.