Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and software technology firm Palantir, has blasted Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett as Bitcoins ‘number one enemy’.
Thiel’s comments about Buffet and others on an “enemies list” came at the Bitcoin 2022 conference held in Miami. In his keynote speech, Thiel said the person with the most negativity about cryptocurrency, and who does it in the most direct way is the American tycoon and investment guru.
According to the PayPal co-founder, it’s time to expose those working to prevent the adoption of Bitcoin, with the "sociopathic grandpa from Omaha" – referring to Buffet – top of that list.
In one of his earliest remarks about Bitcoin, Buffet said it was “rat poison” and that he’d never own the cryptocurrency.
“Deeply political” choices
Other than Buffett, Thiel criticized JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s largest investment manager BlackRock.
He believes the lack of investments from these funds and banks is due to nothing else but institutional and political bias on Wall Street. According to him, most of the money and investment managers are ready to tout blockchain’s benefits, but when it comes to Bitcoin, then it’s worthless and risky.
“They need to be allocating some of their money to bitcoin,” he noted, adding that the crypto community needed to “push back” for this to happen.
He calls the failure to allocate to bitcoin as a choice that’s just “deeply political” and not at all related to any understanding of the crypto.
Thiel believes Bitcoin’s value will still rise exponentially in the future, with the community’s push against wrong narratives key to that happening. He said that that is what Bitcoin needs if it has to see another “10x or 100x from here.”
Bitcoin was trading around $43,000 on Friday, about 5% down in the past week. The cryptocurrency has retreated from highs of $48,000 as a drawdown in equities cascaded to the crypto market. In November 2021, Bitcoin surged to an all-time high above $69k.