After the price of bitcoin fell Friday following Elon Musk’s “breakup tweet,” Alex Machinsky, CEO of Celsius Network, discounted the Tesla (TSLA) CEO’s role in cryptocurrency at the Bitcoin Conference 2021 in Miami.
“Elon [Musk] is a tourist in crypto,” Mashinsky told Yahoo Finance Live. “He’s here to collect followers. I don’t think he’s here to make the world a better place, and we can go to where we’re going with Elon or without Elon.”
Bitcoin’s (BTC-USD) price fell nearly 7 percent Friday after Musk tweeted a meme describing a breakup and captioning it ‘#Bitcoin’ with a heartbreak emoji.
“Elon continues to tweet, the price of Bitcoin continues to stay lower than it probably should, which gives all of the plebs the opportunity to buy up cheap Bitcoin,” said Pomp Investments Founder and bitcoin bull Anthony Pompliano in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live at the conference.
Currently, bitcoin is down more than 40% from its record high of over $64,000 in April. Tesla’s move to cease accepting the cryptocurrency as a payment brought bitcoin’s value down by over 35% last month.
“I’m more bullish today than I’ve ever been,” Pompiliano said. He cited stronger fundamentals, greater adoption, more transactions occurring, and a greater belief in bitcoin as a store of value as reasons for optimism for the cryptocurrency’s future.
“When you look at the underlying fundamentals, forget price, bitcoin has never been stronger than today,” Pompiliano said. “I don’t think people are really accounting for the fundamentals, they’re all just looking at price, looking at tweets, and they’re getting caught up in the emotional sentiment,” he added.
“We started with retail, we then moved in and we started to get financial institutions, then we got corporations,” Pompiliano said. “There’s one group of people left, and they’re coming; it’s the countries and central banks … I think this year, we’ll see a country or a central bank come out and go ahead and say, look, we’ve decided to either purchase it, put it in their reserves, etc.”
Ihsaan Fanusie is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @IFanusie.
More from Ihsaan:
‘Vaccine confidence has gone up significantly’ in communities of color: Doctor
Connecticut to offer a $1,000 bonus for individuals re-entering job market
‘COVID piggy banks’ fuel millennial home buying surge: CJ Dalton president
Lower global mobility will continue to weigh down international economy: Barclays
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit