Mary Barra, who has served equally the main executive officer of General Motors for seven years, said the company has no immediate plans to emulate Tesla's Bitcoin buy.

During GM's Q4 2020 earnings call today, Barra said the firm would monitor demand for customers wanting to pay for vehicles using Bitcoin (BTC), but didn't intend to make a massive crypto purchase like Tesla just nonetheless.

"This is something we'll monitor and we'll evaluate," she said. "If there's strong customer demand for it in the time to come, at that place'southward nothing that precludes us from doing that.

"We don't have whatsoever plans to invest in Bitcoin, and then total-cease there."

A U.Due south. institution, General Motors has not always been on the forefront of innovation. The business firm scrapped one of the earliest mass-produced electric vehicles, the EV1, in the early on 2000s. Then-CEO Rick Wagoner later called this one of the worst decisions during his time at GM in terms of the visitor image.

Nonetheless, the visitor is not entirely disassociated from the blockchain ecosystem. GM currently holds several blockchain-based patents, including ones to manage information from autonomous vehicles and continuously update a vehicle'southward navigation map system. In addition, the firm, along with other car manufacturers, launched the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative, a group aiming to improve transportation using blockchain technology.

In the wake of Tesla's $1.5 billion Bitcoin acquisition this week, some executives at major companies take been direct asked if they will follow the car manufacturer'south example and invest in crypto, or consider offering it for payments in the time to come. Though Twitter CFO Ned Segal said the tech firm was exploring the possibility of paying its employees in BTC, non many companies have yet suggested they will follow suit.

GM's market capitalization is roughly a tenth the size of Tesla'southward, at $77.9 billion, although information technology had more than $36 billion in greenbacks on hand by Q3 2020 — enough to purchase about 800,000 BTC after the price of the crypto nugget dipped under $45,000 today.