Tesla buyers can purchase vehicles with bitcoin, Musk says

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday announced that his customers can now purchase electric vehicles using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

“You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin,” Musk said in a Twitter thread outlining how purchases will be handled.

You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2021

He also stated in a tweet that customers outside of the United States will have the option to make purchases using Bitcoin later this year.

Last month, Tesla announced that it purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and had plans to accept the cryptocurrency as a form of payment in the future.

Since Musk’s Wednesday tweet, Bitcoin, which is currently the world’s largest digital currency, has increased by 4 percent and is trading at $56,429, according to Reuters.

While Bitcoin has recently been embraced by companies such as Mastercard and Bank of New York Mellon following Tesla’s purchase, it has been rarely used for commerce, Reuters noted. The cryptocurrency is known to have high volatility and is also costly with slow processing times.

Musk also wrote that Tesla will not convert the Bitcoin payments it receives into traditional currency and noted that his company will use “internal & open source software” in his thread.

Last month, he criticized cash, saying that when the currency “has negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere,” Reuters reported.