During an interview with the New York Times today, Apple CEO Tim Cook talked about the future of Augmented Reality (AR) and shared his opinion on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

In his conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin for the DealBook online conference, Cook said that Apple is “looking at” crypto but has no plans to make related announcements in the near future. He mentioned that, unlike Tesla, Apple doesn’t plan to invest in cryptocurrency as an organization because he believes its shareholders don’t buy its stock to trade in cryptocurrencies. This further sets the company apart from Tesla that briefly accepted Bitcoin as payment for its cars.

Cook said that Apple doesn’t plan to accept cryptocurrency as payment for products or through Apple Pay in the “immediate future.”

“It’s something we are looking at, it’s not something we have immediate plans to do. I would characterize it as there are things that I would not do like our cash balance. I would not go and invest that in crypto not because I would not invest my own money in crypto, but because I don’t think people buy Apple stock to get exposure to crypto. So if they want to do that, they can, you know, invest directly in crypto through other means. And so I would not do that. I’m not planning to in the immediate future to take crypto for our products as a means of tender, but there are other things that we are definitely looking at.”

Interestingly, the Apple CEO revealed that he does own cryptocurrency himself, saying “it’s reasonable to own it as a part of our diversified portfolio.” He added that this doesn’t mean he is giving anybody “investment advice.” On a related tangent, Cook said that the concept of NFTs is “interesting” but “it will take a while to play out in a way that is for the mainstream person.”

This marks the first time that Tim Cook has personally addressed cryptocurrency at length, although Apple Pay Vice President Jennifer Bailey spoke about this in 2019. At the time, Bailey said that Apple was watching the industry and saw cryptocurrency as something that offered “interesting long-term potential.”