At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting over the weekend, Buffett once again made a series of comments against bitcoin, prompting pushback and ridicule from cryptocurrency supporters, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk.“I don’t know if the price of bitcoin will go up and down in the next year, or five or 10 years,” Buffett said at the shareholder meeting, explaining that he has long disliked bitcoin because it doesn’t produce anything tangible.
Buffett also said: “If you told me you had all the bitcoins in the world and sold them for $25, I wouldn’t have them either, because what can I do with it? I have to sell it back to you, Anyway. So it’s not going to do anything.”
Marc Andreessen, an American billionaire and venture capitalist who supports cryptocurrency, posted a video on Twitter that clips together scenes of Buffett talking about Bitcoin on multiple occasions, and commented: ” It’s crazy that he’s still peddling diabetes outright when he’s saying these things.” This refers to See’s candies that were placed on the table when Buffett attended the shareholders meeting, and his old partner Munger was still there to eat.
Musk responded under Anderson’s video: “Haha, he said ‘Bitcoin’ so many times.”
Bitcoin super bull Michael Thaler, founder and CEO of MicroStrategy, also noted Buffett’s latest remarks, sarcastically saying: “Everyone keeps talking about Bitcoin.”
Others in the Bitcoin community also responded to Buffett’s remarks, pointing out that while he has publicly disparaged Bitcoin many times, his portfolio cannot escape its ties to Bitcoin.
One cryptocurrency proponent wrote: “Buffett said he wouldn’t buy all the bitcoin in the world for $25, but he invested in a Brazilian bank called Nubank, which has a bitcoin ETF listed. ignore him…”
At the 2022 Bitcoin Conference in Miami last month, American billionaire Peter Thiel, known as the “Godfather of Silicon Valley Venture Capital,” called Buffett “Bitcoin’s number one enemy.”