Bitcoin is ‘Disgusting’, Says Billionaire Charlie Munger At Berkshire Hathaway Meeting

The world’s most valuable cryptocurrency is “disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization” says billionaire Charlie Munger, famed as Warren Buffet’s right hand man during Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting.

Charlie Munger, 97, is worth more than $2billion and has spent close to a century being a huge benificiary of the prevailing economic system.

But Munger, vice president of the holding company Berkshire Hathaway, does not appear to be very keen on the emerging global financial system being built around crypto.

Speaking during a Q&A session at an annual shareholder meeting that’s claimed to be the most watched business event of the year, the super-rich nonagenarian was asked if he still considered Bitcoin to be “worthless artificial gold”.

“Of course I hate the Bitcoin success. I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth, nor do I like just shuffling out of your extra billions of billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air.”

“I think I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.”

Charlie Munger

Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, dodged the question.

“I knew there’d be a question on Bitcoin” he said. “I thought to myself: ‘Well, I’ve watched these politicians dodge questions all the time.'”

“I always find it kind of disgusting when they do it. But the truth is, I’m going to dodge that question because we’ve probably got hundreds of thousands of people watching this that own Bitcoin, and we’ve got two people that are short. We’ve got a choice of making 400,000 people mad at us and unhappy and/or making two people happy. That’s just a dumb equation.”

Warren Buffet

Berkshire Hathaway is a corporate giant which owns many famous companies including Duracell and Fruit of The Loom.

Fool’s Gold Or The New Standard?

Munger has previously said that Bitcoin is “too volatile to serve well as a medium of exchange”.

Speaking at the Annual Meeting of Shareholders of the Daily Journal Corporation in February, he said: “It’s really kind of an artificial substitute for gold. And since I never buy any gold, I never buy any bitcoin.”

“Bitcoin reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said about fox hunting. He said it was the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable.”

Crypto investors don’t appear to share the billionaire’s feelings about Bitcoin.

The price of Bitcoin has now surged to well above $50,000 and Ethereum hit an all-time high as it soared to more than $3,000 per token.

In total, the total cryptocurrency market cap is over $2trillion – making it worth one thousand times more than Charlie Munger.

Warren Buffet himself is worth more than $100billion, so the total value of the cryptomarkets is roughly 20 times larger than his wealth.

Jasper Hamill – Crypto News Guest Author