Elon Musk himself has repeatedly stimulated Bitcoin on Twitter and other platforms.
If you are not 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 over 400% in the last year, Bitcoin has become increasingly popular and everyone, including major investors and policy makers, has talked about it. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, recently invested $ 1.5 billion in cryptocurrency through his company, Tesla Inc., and said Bitcoin will soon be accepted for payments.
For Gates, it’s not something Main Street should buy – plus it’s bad for the environment, because coin mining takes a lot of energy.
“Elon has a lot of money and is very sophisticated, so I don’t worry about his Bitcoin going up or down at random,” Gates said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. “I think people are bought into these mania, which may not have that much money in reserve. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you should probably be careful.”
Musk himself has repeatedly stimulated Bitcoin on Twitter and other platforms.
Musk, valued at $ 189.6 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, was a passionate supporter of Bitcoin – so much so that it influenced the price of the symbol. This month it rose by up to 76% following the Tesla investment, before collapsing by 13% after posting on Twitter that cryptocurrency prices “seem to be high”.
Bitcoin traded around $ 51,400 at 8:30 a.m. in New York on Thursday.
The debate about Bitcoin is not new. Billionaire Warren Buffett believes that cryptocurrencies have no value and do not produce anything. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, another longtime skeptic, told a New York Times conference earlier this week that Bitcoin is an “extremely inefficient way to trade.”
But more and more companies are starting to accept Bitcoin – as PayPal Holdings Inc., Visa Inc. have recently done. and MasterCard Inc. – the symbol has gained wider acceptance. Whereas central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, are studying how to digitize their sovereign currencies, and companies such as Fidelity Investments Inc. launches funds that allow investors to add cryptocurrencies to their portfolios, the debate is here to stay.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published in a syndicated stream.)