Bill Gates: Diversifying Dollar Assets Will Not Include Cryptocurrency
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated in an interview that if he needed to diversify assets into currencies or assets outside of the dollar, he would not choose cryptocurrency. He described himself as a well-known skeptic of assets driven purely by speculation.
He mentioned that he missed out on gold and believes that, in general, a basket of stocks is the best long-term investment, ideally a globally balanced portfolio of stocks. Other options mentioned included the euro, renminbi, and gold.
The interview was conducted by APT around August 28. Gates compared Bitcoin to a "greater fool theory" investment in 2018 and stated he would short it if he could; in 2022, he said that cryptocurrencies and NFTs are entirely based on someone willing to pay a higher price, and he would prefer to own productive farms or companies that manufacture products.
He has not held cryptocurrency for a long time, and his investment preferences align with the Gates Foundation's narrative of productive assets in vaccines, public health, etc. His wealth is primarily derived from Microsoft equity and a global stock portfolio, rather than from cryptocurrency or precious metal trading accounts.
In market mechanisms, the buyers are those who still view Bitcoin as a substitute for the dollar, while sellers include large funds like Gates that publicly refuse to include cryptocurrency in their diversification lists. The event was driven by the interview Q&A; funds do not immediately enter or exit the market based on this statement, but the narrative has shifted from "safe haven alternative" back to "global stock basket"; benefiting are stock index products, while pressured is the narrative that seeks to position cryptocurrency as a substitute for fiat currency.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Gates' response is not about coin prices, but asset classification. Outside of the dollar, he seeks productive claims, not codes maintained by speculative backers. He briefly mentioned missing out on gold: he didn't even consider the recognized millennium commodity as a main holding, let alone include cryptocurrency in the same category. The global balanced stock basket extends Microsoft's equity logic to publicly listed companies worldwide.
The capital path is through equity dividends and profit reinvestment, not halving narratives. Money flows from software and capital markets into the foundation and stock portfolio, not into on-chain addresses. His statements in 2018 about shorting, in 2022 about the greater fool theory, and in 2026 still not choosing cryptocurrency form a consistent line of rejection. The foundation seeks auditable outputs, which cryptocurrency cannot provide in terms of vaccine doses.
This aligns with Warren Buffett's avoidance of Bitcoin, Ray Dalio's later allowance for Bitcoin, and Paul Tudor Jones holding both gold and Bitcoin simultaneously. Tech billionaires find themselves in a split position: their companies are priced based on equity, yet they refuse to treat non-cash-flow tokens as dollar hedges. Microsoft benefits from cloud computing and AI capital expenditures, while Gates' personal account continues to exclude speculative assets from his diversification list.
Structurally, the pricing power has not shifted. The mechanism is: when the main buyers of an asset are driven by belief rather than discounted cash flow, skeptics will remove it from the currency basket, leaving it only in the speculative basket. The stock basket seeks global corporate profits, while cryptocurrency seeks the next round of more speculative funds. Different classifications mean they won't appear in the same answer.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- Diversifying currency risk does not mean including speculative assets in the same basket.
- Those who missed out on gold are even less likely to use cryptocurrency to fill that gap.
- Productive claims and codes backed by speculative buyers do not belong on the same list.