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Mary Barra, who served as CEO of General Motors for seven years, said the company had no immediate plans to emulate Tesla’s purchase of Bitcoin.
During GM’s fourth quarter 2020 earnings call today, Barra said the company will monitor demand from customers who want to pay for vehicles using Bitcoin (BTC), but has no plans to make a massive crypto purchase like Tesla at the moment.
“This is something that we will be monitoring and evaluating,” she said. “If there is a high demand from customers in the future, nothing prevents us from doing so.
“We don’t plan to invest in Bitcoin, so stop there.”
An American institution, General Motors has not always been at the forefront of innovation. The company scrapped one of the first mass-produced electric vehicles, the EV1, in the early 2000s. Then-CEO Rick Wagoner later called the move one of the worst. decisions of his time at GM in terms of corporate image.
However, the business is not entirely divorced from the blockchain ecosystem. GM currently holds several blockchain-based patents, including those for managing autonomous vehicle data and constantly updating a vehicle’s navigation map system. Additionally, the company, along with other automakers, has launched the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative, a group aimed at improving transportation using blockchain technology.
Following Tesla’s $ 1.5 billion acquisition of Bitcoin this week, some big business executives were directly urged to follow the automaker’s lead and invest in crypto, or consider doing so. ‘offer for payments in the future. Although Twitter CFO Ned Segal has said the tech company is exploring the possibility of paying employees to BTC, few companies have yet suggested they will follow suit.
GM’s market cap is about a tenth the size of Tesla, at $ 77.9 billion, despite having more than $ 36 billion in cash in the third quarter of 2020 – enough to buy nearly 800,000 BTC afterward. that the price of the crypto asset has dropped below $ 45,000 today.
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