Hello and welcome to the Bitcoin simulation episode of Slate Money or guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios.

I'm here with Emily Peck of Huffpost.

Hello.

I'm here with former journalist Anna Shamansky.

Hello.

Whose penultimate Slate Money show this is, we will invite you to come up with some questions for her final show later in the show but before we do that we are going to talk about fast fashion and how it

has done surprisingly well during the pandemic we are going to talk about dating which is a big business on the stock market and we are going to talk about dating, which is a big business on the stock market.

And we are going to talk about Tesla and why on earth it feels the need to be sitting on

$1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. Fun conversations all coming up on Slate Money.

So let's start with Tesla buying $1.5 billion of Bitcoin.

Obviously, this is Elon Musk doing the thing that he does best, which is jumping onto memes.

But beyond Elon Musk as meme lord, Anna, do you have a theory of the case?

Like, what the hell is going on here?

And is this a sign of like extreme decay of late capitalism that you have companies doing

crazy things like this?

No, I think this is somewhat unique to Elon Musk.

I think that this is likely as simple as the fact that Elon Musk has bought into the Bitcoin thesis,

or at least part of the Bitcoin thesis,

and believes that, hey, I'm going to take a

percentage of my now relatively decent size cash holdings and invest in this thing that I believe is

going to go up significantly. And because it has gone up significantly in the past six months,

...