A hot potato: Most people are in one of three camps when it comes to cryptocurrency: love it, dislike it, or indifferent to the whole concept of digital currency. Billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger appears to have a category all of his own—he despises it with a passion.

Speaking during a shareholder meeting for Los Angeles-based newspaper chain Daily Journal Corp., Munger said crypto was only useful for extortion, kidnappings, and tax evasion, calling it “beyond contempt.”

In case anyone was still unsure about how he feels, Munger added that he wished crypto had been banned immediately and praised China for banning it. “I certainly didn’t invest in crypto. I’m proud of the fact that I avoided it. It’s like some venereal disease,” Munger added.

Munger has made his feelings on crypto known in the past. “I hate the bitcoin success,” he said last year. “I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.”

Despite his apparent loathing, Munger said he was not completely opposed to the US Federal Reserve launching its own digital currency. “The Federal Reserve could have a currency if they want one […] we’ve got a digital currency already, it’s called a bank account. The banks are all integrated with the Federal Reserve system.”

Munger also spoke about the GameStop stock craze in 2021. “The great short squeeze in GameStop was wretched excess, certainly the bitcoin thing was wretched excess,” he said. Munger added that he would put a tax on short-term gains made in the stock market, thereby discouraging similar “speculation” and reducing market liquidity.

It’s often been said that the older generations of millionaires and billionaires, such as Bill Gates, are less willing to embrace crypto than their younger counterparts. Perhaps illustrating this claim is the fact that 98-year-old Munger was born in the same year Lenin died and the Ottoman Empire ended, and his 91-year-old boss Warren Buffet once called Bitcoin “rat poison squared.”

For all that the pair seem to hate crypto, it hasn’t stopped Berkshire Hathaway from buying $1 billion worth of shares in Nubank, Brazil’s largest fintech bank, which is popular among crypto investors within the South American nation, reports Cointelegraph.

Image credit: Rodnae Productions




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