Bill Gates: "Cryptocurrency? Completely Useless... It's Self-Deception"

Bill Gates (69), co-founder of Microsoft (MS), the world's largest software company, evaluated virtual currency as "completely useless."

Bill Gates publishes his first autobiography, Source Code: My Beginnings. Photo by AP Yonhap News.

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In an interview with The New York Times (NYT) ahead of the release of his autobiography Source Code: My Beginnings, Gates responded to the question "What use does virtual currency have?" by saying this and pointed out that "people with high IQs are deceiving themselves about that issue." He also said, "There is no billionaire club," and "There is no unified opinion." Gates ranks 8th in the global billionaire list with assets of $165 billion (about 240 trillion KRW) according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

This is not the first time Gates has criticized virtual currency. At a climate change conference held in Berkeley, California in 2022, he said, "NFTs and other virtual currency projects are nonsense based on the 'greater-fool theory.'" The 'greater-fool theory' refers to investing with the expectation that there will be investors who will buy at a higher price, the 'greater fool,' even though it is known that the price of a product is abnormally high.

Because of this, he has been at odds with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. He warned, "Just because Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Tesla invest in Bitcoin does not mean ordinary investors should follow him. If you have less wealth than Musk, be cautious about investing." He also emphasized that a large amount of electricity is consumed in the process of mining or trading Bitcoin, which can have a negative impact on climate change.

Source Code: My Beginnings is the first of Gates's three-part autobiography series. Gates, who will turn 70 this year, wrote an autobiography looking back on his personal life from childhood to the present. The NYT evaluated, "Gates is different from other tech billionaires."

In an earlier interview with The Times of London, Gates also revealed that his divorce from his wife Melinda French Gates was the biggest regret of his life.

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