The Bitcoin Simulation

Slate Money

Slate Podcasts

Business, Investing

4.1 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Felix Salmon, Emily Peck and Anna Szymanski talk about Tesla’s $1.5 million Bitcoin investment, the recent growth of fast fashion and Bumble’s IPO. In the Slate Plus segment: Birkinstocks. (Not to be confused with Birkenstocks.) ‘Ultra-fast Fashion Is Eating the World’ by Rachel Monroe for the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/ultra-fast-fashion-is-eating-the-world/617794/ Email: slatemoney@slate.com Podcast production by Jessamine Molli. Twitter: @felixsalmon, @Three_Guineas, @EmilyRPeck Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:18.1	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.
0:25.6	Hello. I'm here with former journalist Anna Shimanski.
0:30.8	Hello.
0:31.8	Whose penultimate Slate Money show this is, we will invite you to come up
0:39.3	with some questions for her final show later in the show but before we do that we are going to talk
0:45.9	about fast fashion and how it has done surprisingly well during the pandemic we
0:51.2	are going to talk about dating, which is a big business on the stock market, and
0:57.7	we are going to talk about Tesla and why on earth it feels the need to be sitting on 1.5 billion dollars worth of
1:07.6	Bitcoin. Fun conversations all coming up on slate money. So let's start with Tesla buying 1.5 billion dollars of
1:21.6	Bitcoin. Obviously this is Elon Musk doing the thing he does best which is
1:27.2	jumping on to memes but beyond Elon Musk is 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?
1:44.7	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
1:56.5	Bitcoin thesis or at least part of the Bitcoin thesis and believes that hey I'm going to take
2:01.2	a percentage of my now relatively decent size cash holdings
2:06.4	and invest in this thing that I believe is going to go up significantly.
2:09.7	And because it has gone up significantly in the past six months, he assumes it is just going to continue forever.
2:14.3	Just as Tesla Stock has gone up during that exact same period of time and apparently forever.
2:20.1	So let me unpack this a little bit.
2:22.3	What we're talking about is not where
2:24.3	Elon Musk is investing his personal billions. Most of those are still in
2:28.9	Tesla shares and in SpaceX shares. Rather we are talking about where Tesla is investing its cash.
2:37.4	And there have been precedence in the past at places like AirB&B for companies to use their Treasury holdings as they're called,
	...

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