Elon Musk himself has repeatedly boosted Bitcoin on Twitter and other platforms.
Unless you are the richest person in the world, you shouldn’t buy Bitcoin. That’s the message from Bill Gates – the third richest.
With an increase of more than 400% in the past year, Bitcoin has become increasingly mainstream, and everyone, including prominent investors and policymakers, has spoken about it. The world’s on-again, off-again richest person, Elon Musk, recently invested $ 1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency through his company, Tesla Inc., saying that Bitcoin would soon be accepted for payments.
For Gates, it’s not something that Main Street has to buy – and it’s bad for the environment, as mining the coins takes a lot of energy.
“Elon has tons 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 Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. ‘I really think people are getting into these manias who may not have that much money to spare. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you should probably be careful. ‘
Musk himself has repeatedly boosted Bitcoin on Twitter and other platforms.
Musk, who is worth $ 189.6 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is a staunch supporter of Bitcoin – so much so that he influenced the price of the token. It surged a whopping 76% this month after Tesla’s investment, before dropping 13% after he tweeted that cryptocurrency prices “seem high.”
Bitcoin traded around $ 51,400 in New York at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday.
The Bitcoin debate is not new. Billionaire Warren Buffett believes that cryptocurrencies have no value and produce nothing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, also a longtime skeptic, said at a conference in the New York Times earlier this week that Bitcoin is an “extremely inefficient way to make transactions.”
But with more and more companies starting to accept Bitcoin – such as PayPal Holdings Inc., Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. recently – the token has gained wider acceptance. While central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, are studying how to digitize their own sovereign currencies, and companies like Fidelity Investments Inc. launching funds that allow investors to add cryptocurrencies to their wallets, the debate is here to stay.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV personnel and has been published from a syndicated feed.)