The leader in the new era of electric vehicles and space exploration has made an impressive impact on Wall Street. Elon Musk, the CEO and product architect of Tesla, has also made an exciting change that may affect how businesses treat cryptocurrencies and payment.

This past month, Tesla purchased a total of $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. This purchase marks a new era and legitimacy for cryptocurrency. Since Tesla’s purchase, Bitcoin has skyrocketed in value going from $39,000 per Bitcoin last week up to almost $50,000. 

In late January, Musk passed Bezos in the rankings of the richest person in the world, though Bezos has re-taken that position as Tesla stock dropped 2% this past week. Bezos had held the title of the richest person in the world since 2017, until in early January, Musk overtook him after Tesla stocks surged. 

Musk has been in the news headlines more than usual these past couple of months. This can be attributed partially to the recent star link launch through SpaceX, which Musk founded. The Starlink mission is aimed at providing satellite internet around the world for countries where internet access is scarce. Recently, Musk has been seen promoting a new popular cryptocurrency named Dogecoin on his Twitter. This caused huge swarms of people to buy the cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, further inflating the price in the value of that cryptocurrency. 

This is not unusual from Musk, however, as recently he tweeted, “use signal”, which prompted people to buy stock in a company called Signal Advance, a tiny tech company that makes medical detection devices. The tweet was misinterpreted as Musk intending to endorse a privately held encrypted messaging service called Signal. Furthermore, Musk has inflated the price of GameStop stock by his tweet stating, “gamestonk”, driving a surge for purchasing Gamestop (GME) stock in cooperation with the subreddit r/WallStreetBets.

Musk has also had to deal with the failure of Starship One, which exploded due to a landing failure in Cape Canaveral earlier this month. Although the explosion was a setback, it will allow SpaceX to improve Starship One and help with future redundancies. The recent star link launch through SpaceX, another of Musk’s companies, went as expected with the payload reaching orbit and performing as designed. This is a huge step forward for SpaceX and could help a large population to better themselves and access resources they wouldn’t have otherwise. Elon Musk has remained optimistic in his mission for a better future, and it looks like he may be getting close.