Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger took turns bashing bitcoin at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Saturday in Omaha, Neb.
“Whether it goes up or down in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don’t know. But the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it doesn’t produce anything,” Buffett said of cryptocurrency, as reported by CNBC. “It’s got a magic to it and people have attached magics to lots of things.”
He also criticized the passive nature of bitcoin, saying that if he invests in apartments, they’ll produce rent, and if he investments in farmland, they’ll produce crops.
“If you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it?” He said, according to CNBC. “I’d have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything.”
Munger took a less measured approach, saying that “in my life, I try to avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad … and bitcoin does all three.”
“In the first place, it’s stupid because it’s still likely to go to zero,” he said. “It’s evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve System … and third, it makes us look foolish compared to the Communist leader in China. He was smart enough to ban bitcoin in China.”
Buffett has previously called crypto “rat poison squared,” according to CNBC. And earlier this year Munger said it was akin to a “venereal disease,” according to CNN.
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