London, UK (CNN) – Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that customers in the US can now purchase the company’s cars using Bitcoin.
Musk announced the news in a tweet posted on his Twitter account on Wednesday, in which he wrote: “You can now buy a Tesla car with bitcoin.”
Musk added in a subsequent tweet that the bitcoin paid to Tesla would not be converted by the electric car company into regular currency. He also explained that the option to pay with bitcoin will be available outside the US later this year.
Shortly after Musk’s tweet, the price of Bitcoin rose nearly 3% to $ 56,242, more than it cost to buy a “Tesla” prototype Model 3, which costs just under $ 40,000.
The “Tesla” Model X Plaid, the most expensive ever of the company’s cars, starts at around $ 120,000, equivalent to a little more than two Bitcoins.
Tesla had previously indicated its plans to accept the digital currency from buyers in a deposit to the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, when it said it expected “to begin accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for our products in the near future … initially on a limited basis.”
The company also announced at the time that it had invested $ 1.5 billion in bitcoin as part of a strategy to “invest part of the company’s cash in some specific alternative reserve assets.”
Earlier this year, Musk, who had previously expressed doubts about cryptocurrencies, said during an interview on the clubhouse social app that he believed Bitcoin was about to “gain widespread acceptance by traditional finance experts,” adding that it should have been He had to buy the digital currency 8 years ago.
