- Charlie Munger tore into crypto and its touters during one of the last interviews of his life.
- Warren Buffett’s late business partner slammed bitcoin and other tokens as worthless and deplorable.
- Munger trashed crypto promoters, saying most of them are either delusional or “scumballs.”
Charlie Munger eviscerated cryptocurrencies in an interview with Stripe’s cofounder and president John Collison on a new episode of the “Invest Like The Best” podcast. It’s one of the last conversations featuring Munger to be released following his death aged 99 last week.
Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man and Berkshire Hathaway‘s vice-chairman for nearly five decades, trashed bitcoin and other digital tokens as worthless and deplorable, and wished they were banned.
While he much preferred investing in productive assets like businesses, he still preferred gold to crypto.
“I don’t hate gold as an investment as much as I hate cryptocurrency. I think cryptocurrency ought to have been driven out as illegal,” Munger said.
“I don’t think that buying a percentage of nothing is a good investment, even though it’s hard to create more nothing.”
Munger dismissed crypto as a “scumball activity,” and decried its promoters as largely “scumballs” or delusional.
The late investor said the technology served not as a store of wealth, but as a “store of delusion.” He also slammed it for fueling all sorts of undesirable behavior, as it enables anonymous transactions that bypass the conventional financial system.
“It’s ideal for drug dealers, dope dealers, scam artists of various kinds,” he said. “Every kind of criminal you can imagine. Very good in extortion, kidnapping. Why would we want a wonderful, crime-facilitating, new medium of exchange?”
Munger also said it was a “huge mistake” for Sequoia Capital, the storied venture-capital firm, to make an early investment in Robinhood given the trading app’s embrace of crypto.
“You’re successful with Sequoia and you’re identified with financing people like Apple and so on, why in the hell would you take Robinhood, you know it’s some goddamn crypto? It’s totally crazy,” he said.
Munger has railed against crypto on many occasions, calling it “rat poison,” a “venereal disease,” an “open sewer,” and an “absolute horror.” He also said he wouldn’t want anyone involved with crypto to marry into his family.
The price of bitcoin, the most popular crypto, halved to below $15,000 in 2022. Yet it’s more than erased those gains this year to trade above $44,000 – its highest level in more than 18 months.
