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Unless you’re the world’s richest person, you shouldn’t be buying Bitcoin, said Bill Gates in a TV interview.
Gates, the world’s third-richest man after Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, took a shot at the Tesla CEO after the electric vehicle maker announced taking a $1.5 billion stake in Bitcoin.
‘Elon has tons of money and he’s very sophisticated, so I don’t worry that his Bitcoin will sort of randomly go up or down,’ Gates said.
‘I do think people get bought into these manias who may not have as much money to spare, so I’m not bullish on Bitcoin. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you should probably watch out,’ he said.
Gates, who has been promoting his new book on climate change, slammed Bitcoin as environmentally unfriendly, saying that cryptocurrency ‘happens to use a lot of energy’ for the servers used to process transactions.
On Thursday afternoon, Bitcoin was trading at around $49,000, down from a peak of $58,332.36 on February 21.
The decline was fueled in part by Musk’s own tweet that the prices of Bitcoin and smaller crypto rival Ether ‘do seem high.’
The price of Bitcoin, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, rose more than 300 percent in 2020 but has since come off its highs.