In a recent interview at TechCrunch 2022, Bill Gates once again expressed his opposition to cryptocurrencies and NFTs, stating that average investors should not follow the lead of celebrities who are investing in cryptocurrencies. A recent article in Interesting Engineering states,
Gates said these digital assets were “100% based on greater fool theory,” where investors make money on worthless or overvalued assets as long as people were willing to bid higher on them.
Gates also took a jab at non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were all the craze last year. A long list of celebrities from the world of sports, entertainment, and beyond paid top dollar to acquire a digital image of a Bored Ape collection. Gates’ comments were ripe with sarcasm when he said, “expensive digital images of monkeys [will] improve the world immensely.”
Many of the people who have embraced crypto and NFTs won’t listen to Bill Gates, however, as he’s already their “perfect villain” — the prime enemy of all things good and free. Michelle Shen, writing for USA Today, cites research by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of Annenburg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Jamieson states, “In a world in which nothing happens by chance, those with wealth are assumed to have the power to engage in and cover-up malign activities. As a result, Bill Gates is an inevitable subject of conspiracy theories.” Shen continues:
The unfounded and untrue conspiracies keep coming.
Like witches partnered with Satan, Gates has dark allies in the form of Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, and the Chinese government, according to conspiracy theorists’ inaccurate posts on Reddit and 4chan.
Jamieson also found in her research the lie that Fauci was on the board of directors of Microsoft, making Gates his boss, spreading a false narrative that Gates’ goal is to obliterate America, similar to how witches were seen as a threat to Christianity.
Another false theory around Gates is that the pandemic was his plan to depopulate the world and that vaccinations are a way to sterilize the population, a radical leap from Gates’ efforts to raise awareness about overpopulation and climate change.
Rather than dissuading many of the right-leaning crypto-curious, Bill Gates’ anti-crypto statements might just throw fuel on the conspiracy theory fire, and make some of them more likely to turn to crypto. The QAnon crowd is increasingly hawking cryptocurrency, as is the “conspirituality” (conspiracy + spirituality) crowd, which includes comedian-turned-right-wing “freedom patriot” JP Sears, and actor-turned-spiritual-guru Russell Brand, among many others. The Conspirituality Podcast released a great episode last year charting how the conspirituality crowd is exploiting the cryptocurrency craze. I’m sure this latest statement by Gates will be one more piece of “evidence” used to “prove” that, in fact, they should do the opposite of what Gates says and actually invest in crypto.
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