Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR) chair Peter Thiel called out the so-called “financial gerontocracy” that is preventing bitcoin from reaching its next phases.
Speaking at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, the Paypal cofounder named institutional investors in his ‘bitcoin enemies’ list, including Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, who Thiel labeled as a “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha,” as well as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
“If you have some of these large institutional investors, they need to be allocating some of their money to bitcoin,” Thiel said. “When they chose not to allocate to bitcoin that is a deeply political choice and we need to be pushing back on them. We need to say, you have to get onboard on this.”
In highlighting bitcoin’s advantage over fiat money, he theorized that many companies are controlled by the government which is not expected to happen with a decentralized currency.
“Even being in a stock, you’re effectively being in something that’s like a government-linked entity. Companies — woke companies — are sort of quasi-controlled by the government in a way that Bitcoin never will be,” Thiel said.
To make his point, he threw a couple of hundred dollar bills to the first row of the audience, eliciting cheers. “I thought you guys were supposed to be bitcoin maximalists,” he said after.
He also did not mince words in castigating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) as an enemy of bitcoin, drawing parallels between the business approach and the Chinese Communist Party.
“ESG is just a hate factory. It’s a factory for naming enemies, and we should not be allowing them to do that,” Thiel said at the conference.
In February 2022, Thiel, one of the early outside investors of Facebook, stepped down from the Meta Platforms board to focus on the Republican agenda ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Information for this briefing was found via Seeking Alpha and Fox Business. The author has no securities or affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
