Missing: Elon Musk's Bitcoin Wallet
This week Elon Musk made an offhand comment which revealed that he did, indeed, own a stash of bitcoin at one point. The amount wasn't especially massive – not by today's standards, anyway. What's important is this wallet's proximity to Elon Musk in the past, and how aware of the amount Musk remains today.
Musk said this week that he owns "zero" cryptocurrency, save one wallet with bitcoin inside. "Apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago," said Musk, "I literally own zero cryptocurrency." The keys here are the exact amount – that's no random, pull-out-of-a-hat amount – and the timing.
"Many years ago" doesn't exactly match up well with the amount of time the word Bitcoin has meant anything to the world. It was in the year 2009 that Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin to the world – and that's not too far back in time, is it? Maybe Musk misremembers when he attained the bitcoin – but could it have been right at the start, or maybe the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto being Elon Musk himself is true?
When Musk says "not sure," he's referencing a question he received about an Ethereum scam run on Twitter in recent weeks. The scam he is referring to – and that he's notified Twitter's head about – is the one we wrote about early this month. That scam involves impersonating a celebrity and replying to a Twitter thread they've started, suggesting they have Bitcoin or Ethereum to give away.
These scammers ask users to send them a relatively small amount of cryptocoin, and in return they're supposed to send a whole lot more back. But, as you may have guessed, they don't send back a thing. Instead, they transfer their coins into Monero, and all traces of the evildoers is gone forever.
But back to Musk – where did he put that .25 bitcoin? And how much is that worth today? At the moment this article is set to be published, .25 bitcoin is worth about $2,500 USD. We're real near $10k USD at the moment. I don't think Musk is spending any real effort attempting to dig said wallet up – it's just not worth it to a man worth $20-billion (more or less.) That's .25 bitcoin we'll never see in circulation again!