Warren Buffett's Farewell as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Ends with a Paradox That Will Reverberate Through Bitcoin Markets

Despite stepping down as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:) after 83 years with the firm, and 70 years investing in public markets, legendary investor Warren Buffett had one final paradox to share with shareholders at the annual meeting on Saturday.

After eight decades of transforming a floundering textile mill into a $1.16 trillion conglomerate, the 94-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” is handing over the reins to vice-chairman Greg Abel when 2025 draws to a close.

But moments after confirming that macroeconomic cycles and the role of government money will remain closely linked in his retirement, the world’s most celebrated value investor delivered a sweeping warning about the long-term corrosion of government money—an argument that, stripped of its author’s intent, reads like a précis of the Bitcoin thesis.

From the stage in Omaha’s CHI Health Center, Buffett said that the greatest threat to capital is not a bear market or a recession but “the tendency of a government to want to debase its currency over time.”

“If you’ve got people that control the currency, you can issue a paper money and you will,” he said, adding that “the natural course of government is to make the currency worth less over time, and that’s got important consequences.” He concluded that “we wouldn’t want to be owning anything that we thought was in a currency that was really going to hell.”

Those sentences, delivered without reference to Bitcoin, nevertheless ricocheted through crypto X within seconds. Pseudonymous BTC commentator Carl Menger interpreted them as an inadvertent endorsement of a non-sovereign alternative, writing that Buffett “suggests it might be wise ‘to own a lot of other currencies’ besides the US Dollar. Almost like a decentralized, non-sovereign currency could fix this.”

Menger then quipped that the nonagenarian “still can’t grasp the value of Bitcoin and rather stacks other fiat Shitcoins.”

MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:) executive chairman Michael Saylor—who in 2023 said, “Bitcoin is the answer to the question that mystifies Warren Buffett” —renewed the critique on Saturday, branding Berkshire “20th Century Bitcoin.” The contrast is stark: while Berkshire’s cash pile has swollen to $347.7 billion at the end of Q1 2025, up from $334.2 billion three months earlier, Saylor has been converting every spare corporate dollar into BTC.

Buffett’s decision to sit on a record hoard signals that, in his view, equity valuations remain unappetizing; for Bitcoin advocates, it is further proof that fiat liquidity is best redeployed into hard digital assets rather than idling in Treasuries and T-bills.

Yet “the catch” is that Buffett’s philosophical alignment with monetary debasement hawks does not alter his personal verdict on Bitcoin. He still regards the asset with unalloyed contempt. In 2018 he famously called it “probably rat poison squared.”

In 2020 he told CNBC that cryptocurrencies have “no value and they don’t produce anything,” and at the 2022 shareholder meeting he declared he would not buy the entire Bitcoin supply for $25 because “it isn't going to do anything.” Saturday’s stagecraft did nothing to soften those views; the man who transformed a floundering textile mill into a $1.16 trillion conglomerate remains committed to productive enterprises over digitally scarce commodities.

At press time, BTC traded at $94,629.