Because Tesla's most valuable product aside from the cars is the memes.

I am not kidding. It seems a substantial proportion of TSLA buyers aren't really interested in its fundamentals but like what Elon tweets out.

Tesla's Q1 operating profit of $594M was slightly less than the sum of their $101M Bitcoin profit and the $518M regulatory credits they received[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/n0jxyt/tes...

Just because Elon Musk does something it doesn't mean it has to make sense. Tesla's shareholders can trade bitcoins themselves. They don't need Tesla to do that.

Tesla and Nvidia are entirely different from each other. Tesla's business model has been built on government subsidies, while Nvidia's business model is to sell product. One needs to create profit somehow, and the other is able to alienate one segment of purchasers in preference of another.

In addition to the revenue from selling cars. The GP was asking why Nvidia doesn't stop selling their cards and use them to generate bitcoin as a mining company.

Tesla simply took some of their cash and invested in Bitcoin, they didn't shift production or pivot their business.

The fact that they made money off of the investment and whether or not it was more than their revenue is irrelevant, the move didn't affect their core business, it was just lucrative.

Its not particularly unlikely that Elon Musk gets imprisoned for running pump and dump schemes

Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/tesla-stop-accep...

This is just an uneducated guess but is it possible that Tesla is just a company investing heavily in R&D of cars, and hasn't really begun to run a profit yet alongside some somewhat profitable speculative Bitcoin venture that Elon Musk's somehow put under the same roof?

According to that article if you split out the emission credits as well then they've made around -200% more profit selling Bitcoin and -600% more profit with emission credits than selling cars.

The fact that both are negative should tell you something's gone awry.