Thursday, February 25, 2021
Do not board unless …
Bill Gates warns of Bitcoin pitfalls
Crypto currencies are not only taken by Tesla boss Musk. More and more small investors are also investing in spite of sometimes large price fluctuations. For newbies who want to benefit from the current Bitcoin frenzy, Microsoft founder Gates has a tip: hands off, you should have less money than Musk.
The head of the electric car maker Tesla, Elon Musk, obviously has a weakness for cryptocurrencies. He had given some Internet currencies a boost with positive tweets in the past few weeks. The rally of the Bitcoin price in particular picked up speed again after Tesla announced that it had invested 1.5 billion in Bitcoin. While some analysts see further upside potential, critics warn of the risks of highly volatile digital currencies. So does Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Unless you're the richest person in the world, don't buy bitcoin, Gates advised Bloomberg Television. "Elon has tons of money and is very clever. I don't worry about his bitcoins going up and down." But he assumes that people are now jumping on the hype who might not have as much money as the Tesla boss. "My general tip would be, if you have less money than Elon, you should probably be careful," says Gates. For the Microsoft founder, Bitcoins are simply not something the ordinary citizen should get into. In addition, mining the coins is bad for the environment because it requires a lot of energy.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk has a fortune of 189.6 billion US dollars and only dethroned the boss of the online giant Amazon Jeff Bezos, who has been the richest person in the world since 2017, in the ranking. The 49-year-old entrepreneur owns 18 percent of the shares in Tesla. The upswing in the share made a decisive contribution to his new title.
The deputy boss of star investor Warren Buffets investment company Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, has recently expressed himself as critical as Gates. At the annual general meeting of the US media group Daily Journal Corporation, Munger said: "I don't think Bitcoin will establish itself as a medium of exchange for the world." The crypto currency is too volatile for that and he doesn't know which price rally he thinks is worse, that of Tesla or that of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is unsuitable as a means of payment because of its strong price fluctuations.
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