Bill Gates doesn’t own cryptocurrency because he “likes investing in things that have valuable output,” he told readers on a Thursday “ask me anything” Reddit thread.
“The value of companies is based on how they make great products,” he wrote. “The value of crypto is just what some other person decides someone else will pay for it, so not adding to society like other investments.”
Crypto crashed and burned earlier this month, with $200 billion erased in just 24 hours. Rising inflation, interest rate hikes, and geopolitical instability could be contributing factors, Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez previously reported.
Gates isn’t the only man among the world’s richest to shun crypto. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger took turns bashing bitcoin at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Neb., in late April.
“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.
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 had 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.
