Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has called Warren Buffett a “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha,” despite denouncing JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as “enemies of Bitcoin.”
The Trump-supporting tech mogul called the Buffett-Fink-Dimon troika a “gerontocracy” standing in the way of a cryptocurrency revolution.
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a former Facebook angel investor, made the comments during a Bitcoin conference in Miami.
“Bitcoin is not a company,” Thiel said. “It has no board. We don’t know who [founder] satoshi [Nakamoto] is. … The financial gerontocracy running the country through some silly notion of virtue signaling hate factory like ESG [environmental, social and governance] they are contrary to what I would call a revolutionary youth movement.”
“We will try to unmask them,” Thiel continued. “If they choose not to allocate bitcoin, it is a deeply political decision and we must stand up against them.”
Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, once called cryptocurrencies “rat poison”. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Thiel said he warned traditional investors to use the cryptocurrency as a hedge against rapidly rising inflation and that central bankers ignored him at their peril, according to the remarks reported by Bloomberg.
Thiel singled out Buffett, whom he called Bitcoin’s “No. 1 Enemy.”
Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” once referred to cryptocurrency as “rat poison.” His 98-year-old right-hand man, Charlie Munger, recently likened cryptocurrency to “venereal diseases.”
Still, earlier this year her investment firm Berkshire Hathaway bought a $1 billion stake in Nubank, a Brazil-based digital lender that facilitates crypto transactions.
Thiel also singled out JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for criticism.AP
Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, called Bitcoin a “scam” and “worthless.” But in a recent letter to shareholders, he wrote that “decentralized funding [DeFi] and blockchain are real, new technologies that can be used both publicly and privately, permitted or not.”
Blockchain is the technology that underlies cryptocurrency. It is a digital ledger that tracks crypto transactions and other information.
Fink was also an early skeptic about bitcoin, but he has recently softened his stance, saying that his asset management firm is “researching digital currencies, stablecoins, and the underlying technologies to understand how they can help our clients.”
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was also criticized by Thiel for his initial skepticism about cryptocurrency. Getty Images
“A well thought-out global digital payment system can improve the processing of international transactions while reducing the risk of money laundering and corruption,” Fink wrote in a recent letter to shareholders.
“Digital currencies can also help reduce the cost of cross-border payments…”
The Post has reached out to Buffett, JPMorgan Chase, and BlackRock for comment.
Last month, President Biden issued an executive order directing federal agencies to formulate a plan to regulate cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.