A German prankster claims he was behind a mysterious Reddit post last month that seemed to anticipate Tesla’s blockbuster bitcoin purchase this week – and that he was on LSD when he did it, The Post has learned.
Tesla stunned Wall Street on Monday when it revealed it had acquired $ 1.5 billion worth of bitcoin to “further diversify and maximize returns” for the money on its balance sheet. Tesla said it also plans to accept the cryptocurrency as a payment option for its electric cars.
Not long after the surprise announcement, attention turned to a January 2 message from a Reddit user named “TSLAinsider” who claimed to have a good tip about Tesla’s move into the cryptocurrency market.
“You heard it here for the first time – our company just bought 800 million worth of Bitcoin,” read the five-week old message. The user, claiming he was “a software developer working in R&D at Tesla in California,” added that the Elon Musk-led company had purchased 24,701 bitcoin at an average price of $ 33,142 “in the last 72 hours.”
The post looked like such a forward-looking prediction of Tesla’s bitcoin investment that financial news outlets including Reuters and Bloomberg picked it up this week.
But in an interview with The Post, Hendrik, the 24-year-old political science student behind the TSLAinsider account, said he made the post while high on LSD over the holiday season.
“If you want to know the truth, I’m a young German man and I was on Acid writing this post for the past month,” the user told The Post in an email on Tuesday. “I was afflicted that Elon is going to buy Bitcoin, so I made this troll post. And now all the newspapers around the world are writing about it, it’s kind of funny and scary to be honest. “
Hendrik, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he got an intuition that Tesla would invest in Bitcoin after seeing a Twitter exchange in December between Musk and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, whose business intelligence firm for more than $ 1 billion in digital currency last year.
“Me and my girlfriend, we took sour, and I saw the conversation between Michael Saylor and Elon Musk on Twitter, and I thought, yeah, why wouldn’t he buy bitcoin?” Hendrik told The Post in a Zoom interview on Tuesday from Germany. “He’s crazy and he’s got a lot of money, so why not?”
Hendrik provided The Post with a screenshot showing that he was logged into the TSLAinsider Reddit account, which triumphantly posted ‘I TOLD YOU SO’ after Tesla’s Monday announcement that the market was moving.
His first post – which initially received no comments from other users – was dubious enough that moderators from the Reddit forum devoted to Tesla stock removed it, Hendrik said.
It also didn’t quite match Tesla’s regulation filing on Monday, which stated the company bought Bitcoin after changing its investment policy in January. The 72-hour purchases should start in the last days of December if TSLAinsider’s timeline was accurate.
Hendrik said he isn’t active on Reddit, but he decided to joke the site because “everyone goes to Reddit to troll people.” However, he is an active Bitcoin investor and has been since his teens, he says.
“I think it’s part of the technology of the future,” said Hendrik, praising Musk for getting Tesla into the Bitcoin game.
“He opened the door for other companies to do the same as they all want to be like Elon,” he added.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.