Warren Buffett Beaten by Bitcoin (BTC), Here's What Happened

Prominent VC investor and partner at Morgan Creek Digital Anthony Pompliano (known on crypto Twitter as “Pomp”) published a tweet to spread the word that Bitcoin has in a way scored a major victory over its biggest antagonist, legendary investor Warren Buffett (known as the “Oracle of Omaha”) and his Berkshire Hathaway investment fund. Buffett is known to be a persistent Bitcoin hater, although, according to Tron founder Justin Sun, the legendary investor does hold some BTC and TRX.

A vocal Bitcoin evangelist in the past, currently Pompliano is paying a lot more attention to other assets and investment strategies, as he decided that one should not be focused on Bitcoin only. This reverse happened between 2019 and 2022. According to Pomp’s letter to investors published in September 2022, in 2019 he predicted that Bitcoin would rise to $100,000 within 2.5 years from $12,000 back then. However, all BTC did was increase to $69,000 in October 2021, failing to meet Pompliano’s high expectations of it.

This impacted Pompliano’s decision to remove “laser eyes” from his Twitter profile picture and admit that “Bitcoin helped to humble” him.

Bitcoin surpasses Warren Buffett’s company

In his recent tweet, Pompliano wrote that “Bitcoin's market cap is now higher than Berkshire Hathaway's market cap.”

Warren Buffett’s world-famous investment company’s market capitalization has reached $788.13 billion market value, while the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin’s market capitalization value stands at $813,538,305,656, according to CoinMarketCap analytics website.

In a response to one of the comments under his Twitter post, Pompliano specified that “Bitcoin is up approximately 1,000% in the last 5 years. Berkshire is up 76% in the same time frame.”

Warren Buffett is widely known in the crypto community in particular for calling Bitcoin “rat poison squared” several years ago and sticking to his opinion ever since. His right-hand man and the vice president of Berkshire Hathaway, prominent investor Charlie Munger, supported Buffett on his antipathy toward BTC. A month ago, he slammed Bitcoin, likening it to “tossing 'stink ball' into time-tested recipe of traditional finance.”

On Nov. 28, Munger passed away at the age of 99, remaining active in his position as vice president until his death.

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Does Buffett still hold BTC and TRX gifted by Sun?

In 2020, founder of Tron blockchain and its former CEO (now owner of the Poloniex and Huobi exchanges) Justin Sun won the honor of having dinner with Buffett after donating $4.5 million to a charity linked to Buffett. Sun brought several other major figures from the crypto space to the dinner.

Sun stated that during that dinner he tried to explain crypto in simple terms to the legendary investor and persuade him to change his attitude toward it. With this in mind, he presented Buffett with a Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 phone and the built-in crypto wallet contained one Bitcoin and 1,930,830 TRX. However, later on, Buffett told Sun he gave this smartphone with crypto away to the GLIDE Foundation. Buffett added that he does not own any cryptocurrencies and he never will.

As of 2023, Warren Buffett’s portfolio stands at $118.5 billion. On the list of the wealthiest people in the world, Buffett comes in fifth in 2023, following Elon Musk ($245.3 billion), Bernard Arnault ($191.3 billion), Jeff Bezos ($168.4 billion) and Larry Ellison ($146.5 billion).

Buffett is followed by Bill Gates ($117.6 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($115.9 billion) and three other billionaires.