Bill Gates: You Should Probably Not Follow Elon Musk 'To The Moon' On BTC

Repeat after me: Elon Musk is a mega-billionaire; we are not the same.

Bursting Bubbles

It's easy to get sucked up into the mania surrounding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin, which have been in the news lately as their values surge upward.

It feels like easy money: Buy low, sell high, and you'll get to splurge on a Tesla, which just so happens to have announced it'll soon accept car payments in crypto. But Bill Gates has a sobering message for anyone getting caught up in crypto, per a Wednesday night interview with Bloomberg:

Snap out of it, stop pretending to be a billionaire, and don't play games with your money.

BTC Feud

Gates' message comes after his fellow mega-mega-billionaire Elon Musk repeatedly threw his full weight behind crypto, investing $1.5 billion of Tesla's money into Bitcoin and frequently driving up cryptocurrencies' prices merely by hitting "send tweet" and implying that Dogecoin was headed to "the actual Moon." However, you, the person reading this, are not a billionaire. And almost certainly won't become one. So show a little restraint, perhaps?

"Elon has tons of money and he’s very sophisticated, so I don’t worry that his Bitcoin will sort of randomly go up or down," Gates told Bloomberg. "I do think people get bought into these manias who may not have as much money to spare. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you should probably watch out."

Sour Grapes

That said, Bitcoin is worth a lot of money right now. If you happened to make some dough trading Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or any other relentlessly-memeified investments, congratulations!

Just remember this isn't Monopoly money — at least not to you. Elon Musk can afford to cut and run several times over and never even notice his losses. The rest of us, however, probably cannot. Whether or not his biggest fans can internalize this (let alone sustain the hits to their wallets) remains to be seen.

READ MORE: It’s Gates Versus Musk as World’s Richest Spar Over Bitcoin [Bloomberg]

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