A German farce claims he was behind a mysterious Reddit post last month that seemed to anticipate buying the Tesla blockbuster this week – and that he was on LSD when he did, The Post found out.
Tesla stunned Wall Street on Monday when it revealed it had bought $ 1.5 billion in bitcoin to “diversify and maximize returns” on its cash balance sheet. Tesla has said it also intends to start accepting cryptocurrency as a payment option for its electric cars.
Not long after the surprise announcement, attention turned to a January 2 post by a Reddit user named “TSLAinsider” who claimed to have hot advice about moving Tesla to the cryptocurrency market.
“You heard it first here – our company just bought Bitcoin worth 800 million,” the five-week post read. The user, claiming to be “a software developer working on research and development at Tesla in California,” added that the company led by Elon Musk bought 24,701 bitcoins at an average price of $ 33,142 “in the last 72 hours.”
The post looked like such a predictable prediction of Tesla’s bitcoin investment that financial news, including Reuters and Bloomberg, took over this week.
But in an interview with The Post, Hendrik, a 24-year-old political science student behind his TSLAinsider account, said he posted while dealing with LSD during the holiday season.
“If you want to know the truth: I’m a young German and I was on Acid while I was making this post in the last month,” the user told The Post in an email on Tuesday. “I had this feeling that Elon would buy Bitcoin, so I created this trollpost. 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 received an intuition that Tesla would invest in Bitcoin after seeing a December Twitter exchange between Musk and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, whose company business intelligence bought over $ 1 billion in digital currency last year.
“My girlfriend and I took acid and watched the conversation between Michael Saylor and Elon Musk on Twitter and said, yes, why shouldn’t I buy bitcoin?” Hendrik told The Post in a Zoom interview in Germany on Tuesday. “He’s crazy and has a lot of money, so why not?”
Hendrik gave The Post a screenshot that showed up logged into his TSLAinsider Reddit account, which triumphantly posted “I Said It That Way” after Monday’s Tesla announcement.
Her initial post – which initially received no comments from other users – was dubious enough that the moderators of the Reddit forum dedicated to Tesla stock removed it, according to Hendrik.
It also did not align too much with Tesla’s regular filing on Monday, which said the company bought Bitcoin after changing its investment policy in January. The 72-hour acquisitions should have started in the last days of December if the TSLAinsider calendar were correct.
Hendrik said he is otherwise active on Reddit, but decided to make a joke on the site because “everyone goes to Reddit to troll people.” He is, however, an active investor in Bitcoin and has been since he was a teenager, he says.
“I think it’s part of the technology of the future,” Hendrik said, praising Musk for bringing Tesla into the Bitcoin game.
“He opened the door for other companies to do the same, because they all want to be like Elon,” he added.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.