The Warren Buffett Era Ends: How Crypto's Fiercest Critic Shaped Berkshire Hathaway's Billion-Dollar Legacy

At 94, Warren Buffett has officially stepped away from his role as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, ceding daily operations to Greg Abel after six decades of transforming a struggling textile mill into a trillion-dollar financial powerhouse. Yet his most controversial legacy may not be the companies he built or the fortunes he created, but rather his vocal stance against the cryptocurrency revolution—a dismissive posture that defined his later years and made him the crypto world’s most famous skeptic.

From $7.60 to $750,000: The Architect of Berkshire’s Trillion-Dollar Empire

Warren Buffett’s journey began in 1962 when he acquired Berkshire Hathaway at just $7.60 per share. Through decades of disciplined capital allocation and strategic acquisitions, he transformed the struggling mill operator into a conglomerate with Class A shares now trading above $750,000. His personal wealth, drawn almost entirely from Berkshire stock, has accumulated to roughly $150 billion—even after he donated more than $60 billion to charitable causes over two decades.

This meteoric rise stands as a testament to Warren Buffett’s philosophy of tangible value creation. Unlike speculative assets, his strategy relied on acquiring productive enterprises: insurance operations, utility companies, manufacturing businesses, and other tangible holdings that generate real returns. This philosophy would become the cornerstone of his critique against digital assets.

“Rat Poison Squared”: Warren Buffett’s Unrelenting War Against Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Warren Buffett’s most cutting remarks about crypto emerged not in a single moment but across years of increasingly pointed statements. During Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, he intensified a critique he had begun in 2014, telling CNBC that Bitcoin was “probably rat poison squared”—a phrase capturing both its speculative nature and what he viewed as its complete lack of intrinsic value. At that time, Bitcoin hovered around $9,000, having crashed from nearly $20,000 months prior.

But the statement that resonated most throughout the crypto community came at the 2022 annual meeting, when Warren Buffett delivered his now-infamous assessment to tens of thousands of assembled investors: he would not pay $25 for all the Bitcoin in existence. His reasoning was simple and uncompromising—if someone handed him ownership of every Bitcoin globally for that pittance, he would refuse the deal because the asset generates nothing. Unlike farmland that yields crops or apartment buildings that produce rental income, crypto produces no economic output. “Assets, to have value, must deliver something to somebody,” Warren Buffett stated plainly.

His late business partner, Charlie Munger, echoed this disdain with perhaps even harsher language. At the 2021 shareholder meeting, Munger called Bitcoin “disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization,” and later described it as a “turd” and compared its promotion to spreading a “venereal disease.” In interviews with publications like the Wall Street Journal, Munger expressed pride that Berkshire had avoided the entire crypto space entirely.

Greg Abel Takes the Helm: Continuing the Warren Buffett Philosophy in a Crypto-Skeptical Era

With Warren Buffett’s retirement, Greg Abel assumes operational control while Buffett remains as chairman—a transition marking the end of an era defined by value investing, long-term bets on American enterprise, and skepticism toward assets without productive capacity. The question facing investors now is whether this crypto-skeptical philosophy will persist under new leadership or whether Berkshire’s approach to digital assets might evolve.

What remains clear is the indelible mark Warren Buffett left on the investment world: a framework where intrinsic value, productive capacity, and long-term thinking trump speculation and hype. For an industry built on volatility and future promises, that message—delivered consistently over more than a decade—represents perhaps the most formidable challenge crypto has faced from the traditional finance establishment.