Bill Gates has delivered a withering assessment on cryptocurrency, saying that it is useless.
‘There are people with high I.Q.s who have fooled themselves on that one,’ the billionaire Microsoft co-founder told The New York Times.
Gates’ comments come as Bitcoin has hit record highs in recent weeks, and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole has hailed the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House as a positive moment.
The President has said he will introduce policies supportive of digital currencies, and both him and his wife Melania launched their own meme coins last month.
Cryptocurrency prices took a hit on Monday from the prospect of a trade war between the US and its trading partners, with some well-known digital assets seeing values fall more than 10 percent, AP News reported.
However the notoriously volatile investment recovered later on Monday, with Bitcoin rebounding back above $100,000.
Gates, who has a net worth of around $165 billion, has previously shared his skepticism around Bitcoin, and its volatility in particular.
In 2022, he warned that it could be a risky investment for people without substantial financial resources.
Bill Gates has delivered a withering assessment on cryptocurrency, saying that it is useless
In an interview with Bloomberg, he was asked his thoughts on the fact that Elon Musk’s Tesla had substantial Bitcoin holdings at the time.
‘Elon has tons of money and he’s very sophisticated so I don’t worry that his Bitcoin will randomly go up or down,’ Gates said.
‘I do think that people get bought into these manias who maybe don’t have as much money to spare. So I’m not bullish on Bitcoin.
‘My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon then you should probably watch out.’
In 2022, Musk was already the richest person in the world. Now, he has a net worth of over $433 billion and has been given a significant role in the Trump administration.
Gates added that there are things that society invests in that produce output, but Bitcoin is not one of them.
‘Bitcoin happens to use a lot of energy, it happens to promote anonymous transactions, they are not reversible transactions,’ he said.
He added that the Gates Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2000, ‘does a lot in terms of digital currency, but those are things where you can see who is making the transaction.’
Fellow billionaire Warren Buffett has also long been a critic of cryptocurrency, famously calling it ‘rat poison,’ a ‘gambling token,’ and predicting it will come to a ‘bad ending.’
The cryptocurrency industry as a whole has hailed the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House as a positive moment
Warren Buffett is known to be a vocal critic of cryptocurrency, calling it a ‘rat poison,’ and a ‘gambling token’
But despite his disdain for digital assets, particularly Bitcoin, the billionaire is actually invested in a company tied to the cryptocurrency market – Nu Holdings.
Nu Holdings is a digital banking company which launched in Brazil around a decade ago, and now has more than 100 million customers in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
That company’s share price soared 27 percent last year – meaning Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is making a substantial profit.
Nubank, which is one of the world’s largest digital challenger banks, allows users to trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
It also launched its own cryptocurrency trading platform, Nucripto, in 2023, which acquired more than 1 million users in its first month.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway initially invested $500 million in Nubank in 2021 ahead of its IPO.
And now the legendary investor holds over 86 million shares in the company, as of the third quarter of 2024. These are valued at $1.179 billion, according to Benzinga.
