Elon Musk himself has repeatedly boosted Bitcoin on Twitter and other platforms.
Unless you are the richest person in the world, you should not buy Bitcoin. This is the message of Bill Gates – the third richest.
With a rally of more than 400% over the past year, Bitcoin has become increasingly mainstream, and everyone, including prominent investors and policymakers, has been talking about it. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, recently invested $ 1.5 billion in cryptocurrency through his company, Tesla Inc., saying Bitcoin will soon be accepted for payments.
For Gates, this is not something Main Street should buy – and it’s bad for the environment, because mining coins requires a lot of energy.
“Elon has a lot of money and he’s very sophisticated, so I’m not worried about his Bitcoin going up or down randomly,” Gates said in an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg Television. “I think people are bought into these manias who may not have that much money. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you probably need to be careful.”
Musk himself has repeatedly boosted Bitcoin on Twitter and other platforms.
Musk, valued at $ 189.6 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, was an ardent supporter of Bitcoin – so much so that it influenced the price of the token. It rose to 76% this month after Tesla’s investment, before tumbling 13% after tweeting that cryptocurrency prices ‘look’ high.
Bitcoin traded about $ 51,400 at 8:30 a.m. Thursday in New York.
The debate over Bitcoin is not new. Billionaire Warren Buffett believes cryptocurrencies have no value and yield nothing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, another longtime skeptic, told a New York Times conference earlier this week that Bitcoin is an “extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions.”
But with more and more companies starting to accept Bitcoin – like PayPal Holdings Inc., Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. recently did – the award received greater acceptance. As central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, investigate the digitization of their own sovereign currencies, and companies such as Fidelity Investments Inc. launching funds with which investors can add cryptocurrencies to their portfolios should remain the debate here.
(Except for the headline, this story was not processed by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)