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Billionaire Warren Buffett Trashes Bitcoin Again: ‘It’s Rat Poison Squared’

Last Updated March 4, 2021 5:07 PM
Samantha Chang
Last Updated March 4, 2021 5:07 PM

Billionaire Warren Buffett, a notorious bitcoin bear, blasted cryptocurrencies again at the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting on May 5.

Buffett reiterated his earlier warning that “cryptocurrencies will come to bad endings,” the Wall Street Journal reported . “If you had bought gold at the time of Christ and you figure the compound rate on it, it’s a couple tenths of a percent.”

Buffett previously said buying crypto isn’t real investing, but is merely speculative gambling, as CNN has reported. He said unlike real estate or company stocks, virtual currencies have no real value and only attract “charlatans.”‘

“If you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything,” said Buffett. “You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.”

Berkshire Boss: Bitcoin Is A Turd

Buffett went a step further by calling bitcoin “rat poison squared,” according to CNBC reporter Becky Quick, who live-tweeted the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting.

Buffett’s longtime lieutenant, billionaire Charlie Munger, joined the bitcoin bashing, comparing the top cryptocurrency by market cap to turds being traded by people with dementia.

“I like cryptocurrency even less than Warren does … to me it’s just dementia,” Munger said. And a bitcoin trading desk is “like somebody else is trading turds and you’re being left out.”

With his latest jabs, Buffett reiterated his past scathing take-downs of digital currencies. In January 2018, he said crypto will “come to a bad ending.”

“In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending,” Buffett predicted. “If I could buy a five-year put on every one of the cryptocurrencies, I’d be glad to do it but I would never short a dime’s worth.”

Younger Billionaires Are Bullish On Bitcoin

While Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger remain avowed crypto skeptics, a younger generation of tech billionaires like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and tech venture capitalist Tim Draper are unmoved in their conviction that bitcoin is here to stay and will displace all other currencies.

In fact, Draper is so confident in the future of crypto that he has set a $250,000 bitcoin price target for 2022, as CCN.com has reported.

bitcoin bulls jack dorsey tim draper peter thiel
Billionaires Jack Dorsey, Tim Draper and Peter Thiel are bitcoin bulls. (YouTube screenshots)

Draper, an early investor in Skype, Tesla, and Hotmail, says bitcoin will be bigger than all three combined because it’s a revolution that’s bigger than the Internet.

“This is bigger than the internet,” Draper said. “It’s bigger than the Iron Age, the Renaissance. It’s bigger than the Industrial Revolution. This affects the entire world and it’s going to be affected in a faster and more prevalent way than you ever imagined.”

**Update: Buffett and Munger trashed bitcoin again at the 2019 shareholders meeting.