Investor's Corner
Tesla’s Bitcoin reversal confuses Jim Cramer, but he’s not giving up on Elon Musk
Tesla’s reversed outlook on accepting Bitcoin has made plenty of people scratch their heads, including Jim Cramer, a Tesla investor and Elon Musk supporter. On a live stream of his Stock Market Breakdown with Katherine Ross, Cramer says that Tesla’s and Musk’s reasoning for not accepting Bitcoin any longer doesn’t make sense. However, Cramer’s confusion isn’t causing him to give up on Tesla or Musk quite yet. “He does a lot of things that I can’t fathom that turn out to be brilliant.”
On Wednesday, Musk Tweeted a statement indicating that Tesla would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for its products. Citing environmental concerns, Musk and Tesla remained supportive of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies in general. However, according to the statement, mining rigs are powered by fossil fuels, especially coal, and Tesla would be willing to accept another Cryptocurrency that uses less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy per transaction.
Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021
The statement confused many people, including those who hold prevalent positions in the world of investing. One of the confused parties was Barstool founder Dave Portnoy. Portnoy and Musk have had a favorable relationship in the past. Musk even donated to Barstool’s Small Business Fund in January that accumulated $20 million to help small-time companies in America. Portnoy was critical of Tesla’s decision and pledged not to “flip-flop” over Bitcoin. “You will have to rip my bitcoin from my cold dead hands,” Portnoy added.
Unlike @elonmusk I am not flip flopping every other second about #bitcoin. You will have to rip my bitcoin from my cold dead hands
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 12, 2021
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Cramer’s Criticism
Cramer was critical of Musk’s decision and is curious as to what the reasoning is behind the decision. While Musk detailed the environmental concerns, Cramer doesn’t seem to believe that it is the only reason for the decision. “I don’t know why the hell he said it,” Cramer questioned during the show. “I don’t know whether there was another objection besides the environmental, because the environmental doesn’t hold water. It’s been this way the whole time. But he chose to do this, and I don’t get it. But, he does a lot of things that I can’t fathom that turn out to be brilliant.”
It is absolutely possible that Tesla’s decision to accept Bitcoin, an announcement made in March, could have been based on its recent $1.5 billion investment into the Crypto in December 2020. Non-sustainable sources generally power mining rigs, but it does come down to what individual miners choose to utilize as their power source. Cryptos can be mined using clean and environmentally friendly energy. As solar power and other forms of clean energy generation become more popular, the amount of energy used from fossil fuels per transaction will decrease.
Cramer, who was not an Elon Musk supporter several years ago, flipped his stance on Tesla after his daughter convinced him to buy a vehicle after driving one. Since then, Cramer has been vocally supportive of Tesla, Musk, and the stock, holding high hopes and expectations for the company in the coming years.
Musk’s change of heart regarding Bitcoin could have been a simple reversal on the decision. While we do not know whether other factors were involved, Tesla’s ultimate goal is to transition the world to sustainable energy in an accelerated manner, and Bitcoin mining could have gone against what the company stands for. There is no indication that Tesla will scrap Bitcoin altogether, but mining efforts need to become more sustainable in the coming years for Tesla to reconsider accepting the Cryptocurrency.
Cramer’s comments regarding Tesla and Bitcoin can be seen in the video below.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a Tesla stockholder but does not own any Bitcoin and has no intention of initiating any positions within the next 72 hours.
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What do you think about Tesla’s decision? What do you think about Cramer’s comments? Let us know in the comments or reach out to me directly at joey@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
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Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
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Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Elon Musk explains what happens when AI outsmarts all of us
