Charlie Munger

Where Buffett reached for arithmetic, his partner reached for the jugular. On 1 May 2021, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Charlie Munger was asked about Bitcoin — then riding near US$57,000 — and declined every off-ramp the question offered. “I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization,” he said. Not a bubble. Not a fad. Disgusting, and against civilization itself.

Munger built a long career on saying the harsh thing plainly while Buffett said the kind thing slowly, and on crypto he found his purest subject. He objected to it morally as much as financially. He thought it useful chiefly to kidnappers and extortionists, and said so; he thought a country that let it flourish had lost the thread. There was no hedging clause anywhere in it, no “but the technology is interesting.” He simply did not like what it was for, or what it summoned out of people.

He is the purest hater in this ledger, and the Bureau means that as a kind of compliment. Most of the names here dismissed Bitcoin as an investment. Munger dismissed it as a thing that should not exist. That is a harder position to hold and a harder one to walk back, and to his considerable credit he never tried to do either.

The number at the top of this page is what Bitcoin did in the years after he said it. It is a fact about the asset, and it has no bearing whatsoever on whether he was right about the civilisation. A thing can be repugnant and still go up; the market is not a moral tribunal, and Munger, of all people, knew the difference. He was rendering a verdict on what crypto deserved. The chart was answering a narrower question. He went to his grave insisting the two were not the same — and on that, at least, the Bureau cannot fault him.