Ned Segal revealed in an interview that Twitter was open to the idea of adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet
Since the disclosure that Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, a move that helped push the cryptocurrency to an all-time high near $50,000, speculation has grown about whether other companies might follow suit.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bit of a race now,” said Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein about institutional investment in Bitcoin in an interview yesterday. “You’re going to see many other visionary leaders and disruptive companies realize it’s moved from ‘why’ to ‘why not.’”
Twitter could be one of those disruptive companies. Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal suggested in an interview with CNBC that the social media giant was open to the idea of adding Bitcoin to its assets.
“We study closely what other companies are doing to see what we can learn from them,” Segal said in response to Tesla’s Bitcoin investment. “We’ve done a lot of thinking ahead of time about how we might pay employees if they requested Bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they asked to be paid in Bitcoin, and whether we would need to carry Bitcoin on our balance sheet.”
That scenario aligns with the interests of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has long shown public support for Bitcoin — his Twitter bio currently reads #bitcoin — and recently revealed he is now running a Bitcoin node. Dorsey’s payments company, Square, already holds more than $200 million in Bitcoin and announced yesterday a $1 million donation to the crypto policy think tank Coin Center.
When asked what would be the tipping point for Twitter to buy Bitcoin, Segal said: “One of the key things we would look at is whether people asked to transact with us in Bitcoin… When we think about all the different exposures we have, we’re really trying to match our assets and liabilities, and we take the same approach to Bitcoin that we take to all other types of risk.”