Major investor Warren Buffett does not own any shares in major companies that have anything to do with blockchain.
According to Michele del Castillo in Forbes, eight of the world’s ten largest publicly traded companies are “blockchain bulls” because they offer or use a wide range of products based on distributed ledgers, but neither Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway nor Apple owns any shares.
These figures were taken from Forbes’ annual Global 2000 list of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, based on sales, profits, assets and market value. Five of the top ten companies on this list are also on the Forbes Blockchain 50 list. The top one is the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, owned by the Chinese government, which uses at least 30 different blockchain applications such as health care tracking, charitable donations, and more.
Apple is sixth on this list, while Berkshire Hathaway is third.
Apple and Warren Buffett distanced from blockchain
At this point, one wonders whether these two giants are missing out on something. Warren Buffett himself has admitted in the past that he has missed a few trains on innovation, whereas Apple has always been a frontrunner in recent decades.
While Apple has so far remained completely outside this technological revolution, it has recently begun to acknowledge that this could be a business from which it might not make sense to stay outside. Buffett, on the other hand, still seems totally impervious to such considerations.
Rather, the Oracle of Omaha has repeatedly stated explicitly that he considers cryptocurrencies to be something dangerous, something he should stay away from, so he is doing nothing but remaining consistent with his own ideas.
It is worth noting that Buffett himself is also a shareholder of Apple, and that he recently complimented CEO Tim Cook on how he was doing.
However, should Apple decide to integrate a crypto wallet into its Apple Pay, for example, only Warren Buffett would be left among the world’s great financial giants to snub the blockchain.
In the past, minor companies linked to Berkshire Hathaway have actually started working on blockchain-based projects, but apparently nothing came of it in the end. On the other hand, the main applications of blockchain today are in the financial field, thanks to cryptocurrencies, or in the world of collectibles, thanks to NFT, two sectors in which Berkshire Hathaway has little or no presence, as in the case of cryptocurrencies.
Decentralized blockchains, which are the only truly revolutionary ones, are the furthest thing from highly centralized companies such as Apple or Berkshire Hathaway.
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