OK, I needing to look up the meaning of gerontocracy to ‘get’ tech multi-billionaire Peter Thiel’s explosive speech to the world’s premier Bitcoin conference (click here or below to watch). Last night’s keynote starts with Thiel’s younger self addressing the same conference in 1999. The controversial stuff comes near the end.
Wikipaedia defines gerontocracy as ‘a form of oligarchical rule in which an entity is ruled by leaders who are significantly older than most of the adult population.’ It’s not a compliment. And for Thiel, an inability of the old timers of the financial world to move with the times is delaying the adoption of digital money.
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As you’ll witness in the video, Thiel (54) lays into Warren Buffett (91), Jamie Dimon (66) and Larry Fink (69), positioning them as the driving forces against Bitcoin. After the speech his colleague Eric Weinstein, MD of Thiel Capital, tweeted: “It is time the revolutionary youth should understand their enemies and return fire.”
Thiel, long-time friend and former PayPal colleague of high profile US-based South Africans Elon Musk and Roelof Botha, has declared war on the Old Men of Finance. Grab the popcorn – and if you like his argument, maybe some crypto…….
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Tech guru, multi-billionaire Peter Thiel claims ‘finance gerontocracy’ is holding back bitcoin
PayPal founder attacks Warren Buffett as a sociopathic grandpa from Omaha while touting cryptoâs ârevolutionary youth movementâ at Bitcoin conferenceÂ
By Richard Waters in San Francisco for The Financial Times
Peter Thiel, the libertarian tech investor, challenged some of the most powerful US financial figures on Thursday over their criticism of bitcoin, accusing them of trying to suppress what has become a powerful political movement.
Thiel, who made his name as an outspoken contrarian and early investor in Facebook, dismissed revered investor Warren Buffett as a âsociopathic grandpa from Omahaâ. He also cast Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, as part of a âfinance gerontocracyâ that was looking to lock cryptocurrencies out of the mainstream.
His outburst came in front of a cheering crowd at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, where he described the cryptocurrency as part of a ârevolutionary youth movementâ that was out to overturn traditional finance, threatening the power and wealth of the establishment.
Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal (see above with co-founder Elon Musk), has long argued that digital currencies could supplant the current financial system. PayPal gave up on its own digital currency ambitions early in its existence to fit into the existing payments world. While it is now worth $130bn, Thiel described the online payments company as a disappointment compared with what it could have become.
By contrast, he claimed bitcoin, worth $830bn, had the potential to rival all the worldâs gold, worth $13tn. With inflation rising and confidence in paper currencies declining, he also claimed that the value of bitcoin could match that of all public equities, which are currently worth $115tn, just as gold had matched equities at the end of the 1970s.
In an incendiary attack, he claimed that financial leaders had deliberately sought to suppress bitcoin to protect their own power. âItâs a movement, and itâs a political question whether this movement is going to succeed, or whether the enemies of the movement are going to succeed in stopping us,â he said. Buffett, he added, was âenemy number oneâ.
Thiel became the tech worldâs most famous rightwing figure in 2016 when he backed Donald Trumpâs presidential run and spoke at the Republican convention that year.
On Thursday, he lashed out at the fashion for environmental, social and governance investing, depicting it as a core part of the system the financial establishment uses to squash anything that threatens its power.
ESG has become a âhate factory for naming enemiesâ, he claimed, comparing the focus on social and governance issues to the way the Chinese Communist party operates. He also dismissed environmental investing as âsort of fakeâ.
In a sideswipe at companies that responded to pressure from politicians or employees over political issues, he added: âWoke companies are quasi-controlled by the government in a way that bitcoin never will be.â
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