Warren Buffett slams bitcoin as a 'gambling device'
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is not deviating from his position on cryptocurrency.
The Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO told FOX Business's Liz Claman that bitcoin is a “gambling device” that hasn’t produce anything substantive.
“[Bitcoin] doesn’t reproduce. It doesn’t speak to you. And it doesn’t do anything. It’s like a seashell or something, and that is not an investment to me,” he said on Saturday during Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.
Bitcoin recently surged from $5,456 to an annual high of $5,864 with a market cap of $103.4 billion.
But Buffett said bitcoin has a very limited use that has been tied to fraudulent activities.
“I’ll tear off a button here, and we’ll have this as a little token, and I’ll offer it to you for a $1,000 and I’ll see if I can get the price to $2,000 by the end of the day,” he said.
He went on to say, “People will create a gazillion of them naturally. There’s been a lot of fraud connected with them; there have been disappearances. So there has been a lot lost on it.”
Buffett is no stranger to slamming cryptocurrency. Last year, he referred to bitcoin as “rat poison squared” after Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger originally called the cryptocurrency “rat poison” in 2013.