It doesn’t look like legendary investor Warren Buffett will be adding bitcoin to his portfolio any time soon.
Asked Saturday at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting if he had changed his famously negative views on bitcoin or crypto, the 91-year-old investor didn’t mince his words.
Buffett began his answer by saying that if all the attendees in the room owned “all the farmland in the United States” or “all the apartments in the country” and they offered him a 1% stake for $25 billion, he would write them a check on the spot. But he wouldn’t do the same for bitcoin and its over-$700 billion market cap.
“If you … owned all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn’t take it,” Buffett said. “Because what would I do with it? I’ll have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything.”
He described his views on farmland and rental properties versus bitcoin as “the difference between productive assets and something that depends on the next guy paying you more than the last guy got.”
“The apartments are going to produce rent and the farms are going to produce food,” he said. “If I’ve got all the bitcoin, I’m back wherever [anonymous bitcoin founder Satoshi] was.”
He attributed the allure of bitcoin to a type of “magic” that draws investors.
“Whether it goes up or down in the next year or five years or 10 years, I don’t know. But one thing I’m sure of is that it doesn’t multiply, it doesn’t produce anything,” he said. “It’s got a magic to it, and people have attached magic to lots of things.”
Buffett has long been against cryptocurrencies. He told CNBC in 2018 that “they will come to a bad ending” and said that Berkshire Hathaway will “never have a position in them.”
“I get into enough trouble with the things I think I know something about,” he said at the time. “Why in the world should I take a long or short position in something I don’t know about?”
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