What percent of Tesla customers are buying their cars with bitcoins? I doubt it’s more than 1 out of 100, I think it was just a publicity stunt both times, media talked about Tesla when they started accepting them and will talk about them again when they decided to stop it.
Step 2: make an announcement that will likely result in a rising valuation (it briefly went up by ~20% just because Musk added #bitcoin to his bio on Twitter...)
Step 3: sell 10% of your bitcoin at a profit of >$272M in Q1
Step 4: wait for the market to go up again, then proceed with Step 3
It's less risky to invest in a highly volatile, unregulated market if you have the means to somewhat steer the market just by making an announcement or have your company's figurehead add a hashtag on Twitter...
If the market going up again (Step 4) is a sure thing, then Step 3 is obviously sub-optimal. If that is not a sure thing, then they've still got a potential ~$1B net loss.
I am not asserting that Elan's and Tesla's motives were pure. Nor that they complied with all applicable laws, regulations, etc. But "classic pump-and-dump" is a poor and very misleading description of the events to date.
It's a figure of speech and meant to be completely neutral and independent of the actual person. Just like "the face of the company", e.g. Pat Gelsinger in the case of Intel or Tim Cook for Apple.
"Face of the company" and "figurehead" have different meanings. The latter is pejorative. From the dictionary: "a person who is head of a group, company, etc., in title but actually has no real authority or responsibility".
I think you are quite obviously correct. But this is Hacker News. Not (hypothetical handwave) Marketer News. On that (\1) site, your comment would be brutally downvoted for obviousness. ;)
