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Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and the Founders Fund venture capital firm, attacked Warren Buffet, James Dimon, and Larry Fink as a “financial gerontocracy” conspiring to hobble the price of cryptocurrencies.
Buffet is founder and chair of Berkshire Hathaway, Dimon is chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and Fink is chair and CEO of the Blackrock private equity firm.
All have expressed skepticism regarding cryptocurrencies. Buffet once called Bitcoin “rat poison squared” and said it “has no unique value at all.”
The three have chosen not to allocate assets to crypto, which Thiel called “a deeply political choice” and told the crowd at the Bitcoin 2022 conference on 7 April that “we have to push back on that.”
Thiel claimed that the value of Bitcoin alone could equal that of the world’s gold holdings or even that of the U.S. equity market but that these “enemies” of crypto have held its value down by not embracing it.
The world’s gold is estimated to be worth $1.3 trillion; the value of U.S. stocks is calculated to be about $115 trillion, according to the Financial Times.
Bitcoin in total is currently worth about $830 billion.
Thiel bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin before it began its meteoric price rise during the COVID era, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Why has Bitcoin not yet gone up to $100,000, to a million dollars?” Thiel said.
“Why has it not yet converged with gold or even with the equity markets more broadly?”
Thiel told the cheering throng that Bitcoin is part of a “revolutionary youth movement.”
“It’s a movement as a political question, whether this movement is going to succeed, or whether the enemies of the movement are going to succeed in stopping us.”
Thiel is a noted libertarian and conservative political activist who once described Donald Trump as someone who would rebuild America.
Neither Buffet, Dimon, nor Fink commented on Thiel’s critique.