While Tesla’s $1.5 billion bitcoin purchase shook the world, a Reddit user also caused disturbance as it seemed that he predicted the move a month before it was announced. Giant mass media outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg picked up on the story, but the user later admitted that it was a prank, and he was actually on LSD when he wrote it.
Elon Musk’s Tesla became the latest giant company to allocate billions of dollars in bitcoin, as revealed earlier this week. The firm filed a Form-10 with the US SEC, saying that the purchase came somewhere in January.
Although this massive news came as a surprise to most, one Reddit user going by the handle TSLAinsider seemed as he was ahead of the curve. In a January 2nd, 2021 post, he claimed that he worked as a software developer in the R&D department at Tesla in California and that his company “just bought $800 million worth of Bitcoin.”
His post had little-to-no reaction initially, but when news broke that Tesla had indeed bought BTC, it attracted significant attention. It even reached mainstream media as Bloomberg and Reuters reported his statement.
However, there were some discrepancies with his claims and the official filing. For instance, the amount allocated in BTC was almost double in reality, and the prices he put up didn’t match.
It seems that the TSLAinsider Reddit user enjoyed the attention as shortly after Tesla’s actual purchase, he triumphantly posted, “I TOLD YOU SO.” Nevertheless, it all turned out to be just a prank.
He reached out to the NYPost via email, provided a screenshot when the initial post was published to prove that he was indeed behind the publication, and admitted what really transpired.
The user, asked to be referred to as Hendrik, is a “24-year-old political science student” who got inspired by the Twitter conversation between MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor and Tesla’s Elon Musk in late 2020. In it, Saylor tried to convince the world’s richest man to allocate some of the electric vehicle company’s excess cash into BTC.
Hendrik saw this opportunity to comment on the social media platform, but only after taking some substances:
“Me and my girlfriend, we took acid, and I saw the conversation between Michael Saylor and Elon Musk on Twitter, and I was like, yeah, why shouldn’t he buy into bitcoin? He’s crazy, and he has a lot of money, so why not?”
Hendrik added that he had this “afflatus that Elon is going to buy Bitcoin, so I created this troll post and now, all the newspapers around the globe are writing about it, it’s kinda funny and scary, to be honest.”