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The short list of what you can buy with bitcoin is about to get a tad longer, courtesy of Elon Musk.

Why it matters: Musk is going where other companies have failed — trying to transform bitcoin from a speculative investment to a form of payment. It hasn't taken off in the decade-plus that the digital currency has been around.

  • What's different about Musk: He's been tapping into cryptocurrency enthusiasts — many of whom are part of his fandom.

Catch up quick: Tesla will start accepting bitcoin as a form of payment "later this year," Musk said in a a string of early-morning tweets.

  • Musk said bitcoin payments will be retained by the company as bitcoin, not converted back to dollars.
  • Tesla is also setting up its own "nodes," — which means it's contributing computing power to help validate transactions.

What they're saying: "This is quite possibly a gimmick, but it really could be Elon Musk pulling in more early adopters," Craig Irwin, an auto analyst at Roth Capital, tells Axios.

Between the lines: Bitcoin has been a better investment vehicle rather than an easy form of payment, because of its volatility.

  • Buyer beware: Tesla warns (in all-caps) that if a customer makes a return, the refund in bitcoin "might be significantly less" than it was at the time of purchase.
  • Plus, a tax hit: "If the bitcoin that you use to buy a Tesla has gone up tremendously in value, you're going to owe quite a lot in capital gains tax," on top of what you already paid for the bitcoin, Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association, tells Axios.

The big picture: The overlap of bitcoin investorswho will use it to buy a Tesla would be very small on a Venn diagram, says Sam Abuelsamid, an auto research analyst at Guidehouse Insights.

  • "Most of the people who are interested in buying a Tesla more than likely don't even know what bitcoin is," Abuelsamid says.

Remember: Musk and his company are a cultural phenomenon — but its product is still niche. Tesla sold 500,000 million cars out of the 64 million vehicles sold worldwide.

  • Meanwhile, legacy automakers are biting at Tesla's heels as they foray deeper into electric vehicles.

The bottom line: Tesla hinted this was coming last month when the company announced it was putting $1.5 billion of its cash pile into bitcoin.

  • Musk has also been engaging (trolling?) the crypto crowd for weeks on Twitter in the form of memes.

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.