Elon Musk’s company Tesla made a killing with Bitcoin, pulling in a $600 million profit in the fourth quarter of 2024 without even adding to its stash thanks to Bitcoin’s rally past $109,000. The company still holds 11,509 BTC, as confirmed in Tesla’s SEC filing released Monday.
Arkham Intelligence data shows that Tesla’s Bitcoins are now worth $1.1 billion, a far cry from its $38,000-per-coin average purchase price when Tesla originally bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021, snagging 39,474 Bitcoins, though it ended up selling more than 70% of that pile in 2022.
FASB’s new accounting rules flipped the script on crypto profits
Tesla’s record-breaking Bitcoin gain is tied to new accounting standards. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) introduced fair-value accounting rules in December 2024, and that changed everything.
Under the old rules, companies had to report crypto at the lowest value during the accounting period, meaning if Bitcoin prices dropped, companies had to record losses on paper, even if they didn’t sell.
The new system lets companies report their Bitcoin holdings at real market value instead of historical lows. No more waiting until assets are sold to record gains. The SEC filing said:
“Other income (expense), net, changed favorably by $523 million in the year ended December 31, 2024 as compared to the year ended December 31, 2023 primarily due to remeasurement of our bitcoin digital assets to fair value in 2024, partially offset by unfavorable fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates on our intercompany balances. As our intercompany balances are significant in nature and we do not typically hedge foreign currency risk, we can experience significant fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rate gains and losses from period to period.”
The FASB rules aren’t optional, no. Any company holding crypto in the U.S. must follow them starting with fiscal years after December 15, 2024.
The standards only apply to fungible crypto assets like Bitcoin—meaning assets that are identical and interchangeable. NFTs, wrapped tokens, and internally created digital assets are excluded. According to the rules, eligible assets must be intangible, secured by cryptography, and live on a distributed ledger like a blockchain.
Meanwhile, as Cryptopolitan reported in December, Elon is still yet to make good on his promise of bringing back Bitcoin payments to Tesla, which he said he was gonna do whenever its green energy usage surpasses 50%. As of press time, it has hit over 57%, but still, nothing from the Doge Master.
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