The ‘True Currency’—Elon Musk Surprisingly Sides With Bitcoin Critic Warren Buffett Amid Crypto Price Swings

Tesla TSLA billionaire Elon Musk and Berkshire Hathaway's chief executive Warren Buffett often disagree but they've found common ground over the "true currency." And it's not bitcoin. Or maybe it is?

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"If there was anything left on my bucket list, I would have done it. Money has no utility to me. Time has utility to me," Buffett told Bloomberg in 2016 in a clip posted to X over the weekend. Musk replied: "Time is the true currency."

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However, the idea that "bitcoin is time" has been popularized by anonymous bitcoin writer Gigi, whose essay on the subject proposes that bitcoin's "block height" serves as a measure of time and bitcoin a clock that is "the true key-machine of the modern infor­ma­tional age."

"Bitcoin BTC is time in more ways than one. Its units are stored time because they are money, and its network is time because it is a decen­tral­ized clock," Gigi wrote.

Meanwhile, Craig Wright, the computer scientist who's claimed for years without proof he's bitcoin's mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto, said last week in a London court that an early draft of bitcoin's white paper referred to bitcoin as "timecoin."

Buffett, at 93, may be short on time but he certainly isn't short on dollars. Berkshire Hathaway's cash pile has swollen to almost $168 billion and the conglomerate raked in operating earnings of around $8.5 billion in the fourth quarter, it revealed on Saturday, up from $6.6 billion for the same period a year earlier.

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The better-than-expected performance has put the investment company a stone's throw from a $1 trillion market capitalization.

Buffett said in his annual shareholder letter that there was a lack of meaningful deals that would give the company a shot at "eye-popping performance" and "outside the U.S., there are essentially no candidates that are meaningful options for capital deployment at Berkshire."

While Elon Musk has dabbled in bitcoin (and may be planning an X update that would cause crypto price chaos), Buffett has regularly slammed bitcoin and those that trade crypto, claiming during Berkshire Hathaway's 2022 annual shareholder meeting that bitcoin and crypto are not productive assets and branding bitcoin "rat poison squared."

Despite that, one of the Oracle of Omaha's best-performing investments in recent years has been the bitcoin and crypto-friendly Nubank.