Elon Musk's Brother Kimbal Calls Tesla's Bitcoin Purchase 'Very Ignorant'

Kimbal Musk, Tesla Inc TSLA board member and brother of CEO Elon Musk, has called the company’s $1.5-billion Bitcoin BTC/USD purchase “very ignorant.”

What Happened: In an interview with TechCrunch at the Ethereum ETH/USD Denver Conference last week, Kimbal said that Tesla’s decision at the time was not well-informed and the company “had no idea of the environmental impact” of Bitcoin.

“When we invested in Bitcoin, we were very ignorant. We had no idea of the environmental impact, we literally didn’t know, we were like this seems like a good store of value and a good way to diversify assets. And of course, it didn’t take very long to get a million — I’m not kidding probably a million — messages telling us what we were doing to the environment,” he said onstage to a TechCrunch reporter.

“And of course, our company is about creating alternative energy futures so we really were not informed enough when we made that decision.”

Kimbal went on to note that while Tesla doesn’t necessarily regret its Bitcoin purchase, the blockchain industry needs to move toward more infrastructure that has less of an impact on the environment.

Last month, Kimbal set up his own cryptocurrency project, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Big Green DAO that aims to “decentralize philanthropy.”

Tesla still holds $1.7 billion worth of Bitcoin, although it no longer accepts the digital asset as a means of payment. The company accepts Dogecoin DOGE/USD as payment for merchandise on its website.

BTC Price Action: As of Thursday morning, Bitcoin was trading at $36,161 down 6.52% in the last 24 hours.