The late Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger called it “rat poison”; the company’s CEO, Warren Buffett, called it “rat poison squared.” Both agreed it was “worthless.”
Now, it’s bigger than both of them—and some of Wall Street’s other favorite companies.
Off a weeks-long sprint of consistent gains, Bitcoin is now more valuable than financial behemoth Berkshire Hathaway, tech giant Meta, and electric car company Tesla, according to market capitalization data from CoinGecko. At writing, BTC is now the seventh most valuable traded asset in the world.
BTC currently boasts a price of $43,910, putting the cryptocurrency’s market cap at $859 billion. Meta sits at a $820.7 billion valuation; Tesla, at $771.5 billion; Berkshire Hathaway, meanwhile, has recently fallen to a $767.6 billion valuation.
The next market cap in Bitcoin’s crosshairs is that of AI chipmaker and stock market darling Nvidia, which has more than doubled in value this year amidst global AI frenzy. At current BTC supply, the world’s top cryptocurrency would need to pass $58,939 to overtake Nvidia’s $1.153 trillion valuation. To become the most valuable traded asset in the world—and defeat reigning tech giant Apple (market cap: $3 trillion)—Bitcoin would need to eclipse $153,000.
Bitcoin’s reached its all-time high price in November 2021, when the coin briefly passed $69,000.
Many in crypto are hopeful that Bitcoin’s recent ascendance—largely fueled by rumors of the impending approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF—will put the enduring crypto winter to bed, and usher in an unprecedented boom for the struggling digital assets industry. British multinational bank Standard Chartered predicted last week that BTC is on track to hit $100,000 by next year.
In a potentially encouraging sign of the crypto ecosystem’s recovering health, a spate of increasingly absurd meme coins have started receiving substantial influxes of capital.
One such meme coin, MUNGER, riffed last week on the death of the 99-year-old Charlie Munger, who had previously skewered crypto as “massively stupid” and “very dangerous.” The MUNGER coin pumped over 31,000% and amassed over $4 million in trading volume, before imploding and crashing to near-zero.
Edited by Andrew Hayward