1. Up to that sudden 180, Musk had been a cryptocurrency skeptic. What changed?
2. It had nothing to do with Tesla's mission, in-fact it seemed to go against it. At best it was a distraction when there were real problems to deal with.
3. When reality caught up, Tesla reversed course.
I am not stating some grand thing here, this is just my recollection of events.
The first claim isn't true, because Elon has been a bitcoiner for a long time. There was a huge Bitcoin hype / hubris at that time. Specifically, Saylor happened, and he convinced Elon and others that Bitcoin is the best reserve asset, and Tesla had a lot of cash, which was melting like an ice cube due to inflation. There was a lot of inflation talk / protecting against inflation. And in the end it actually worked out for them pretty well, given that BTC has about tripled since then (they bough at $34k).
After they had bought the bitcoin, adding it as a payment option was a way to add hype to increase its value. They quickly found out that it's too volatile for payments to be practical, and the hype cycle was ending anyway and they sold half of their reserve.
Well, he has been aware of it for a long time, and made occasional tweets mentioning it. He has not been a huge bitcoiner, but I don't recall him being a sceptic.
It's a weird thing to fixate on. Everyone who accepts Bitcoin should have a full node. Satoshi was right about Bitcoin having relatively low hardware requirements in the future due to the advancement of hardware.
1. Up to that sudden 180, Musk had been a cryptocurrency skeptic. What changed?
2. It had nothing to do with Tesla's mission, in-fact it seemed to go against it. At best it was a distraction when there were real problems to deal with.
3. When reality caught up, Tesla reversed course.
I am not stating some grand thing here, this is just my recollection of events.