Why Is Marathon Digital's Stock Trading Lower Today?

Marathon Digital Holdings Inc MARA is trading lower Thursday morning as Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk continues to criticize the increasing energy usage of Bitcoin BTC/USD mining.

Marathon Digital mines its own Bitcoin in order to acquire the cryptocurrency at a lower cost.

What Happened: Musk expressed concern over the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions" via Twitter on Wednesday. "Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin."

Bitcoin fell around 5% immediately following Musk's tweet.

Thursday morning, Musk continued his criticism by posting a chart of Bitcoin electricity consumption, saying that the "energy usage trend over past few months is insane."

Why It Matters: Tesla said that it bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin in February and announced that the company would accept Bitcoin as payment for its products. Musk's support for crypto seems to have positively impacted the prices of popular cryptocurrencies since that time.

Price Action: Marathon Digital traded as high as $57.75 and as low as 61 cents over a 52-week period. At last check Thursday, the stock was down 7.22% at $21.20.

Bitcoin was down 7.94% at $50,209 at last check Thursday.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson from Flickr.