Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego said recently that Bitcoin is his “best investment ever.”
Ricardo Benjamín Salinas Pliego is the founder and chairman of Mexican conglomerate Grupo Salinas. On April 7, Forbes declared Salinas, whose net worth is estimated to be around $11.7 billion, the second-richest man in Mexico, and said that he was “the only Mexican billionaire whose fortune went up over the past year.”
On November 17, Salinas recommended the book “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous to his over 800K followers on Twitter, and said that this was the best and most important book for understanding Bitcoin. More interestingly, he revealed that 10% of his liquid assets are invested in Bitcoin.
Recently, during an interview with Cointelegraph’s Giovanni Pigni, he talked about Bitcoin. The interview started with Salinas telling the story of how he first heard about Bitcoin:
“I was invited to a conference in New York’s city… And there were different sessions, and [at] one of the sessions, this guy from Grayscale showed up. And he gave us the whole talk about Bitcoin and how it’s going to take over…. It immediately attracted my attention. I said ‘well, let’s try it out and see what happens’. I put in a small amount. It was trading at $200 per bitcoin. It was 2013, but at that time…
“What I liked about Grayscale was they simplified it — basically you put your money in the trust, then this trust would do the investment, they would take care of the whole thing, they would take care of the custody, they sent you a monthly statement, and that was a very good arrangement, and eventually that that trust turned into GBTC, which is now an exchange-traded product…
Although Bitcoin initially grabbed Salinas’s attention as a “payment vehicle,” he later realized that “it’s the store value that really makes it valuable.”
Later in the interview, Salinas said that he sold all of his BTC holdings in January 2017 (when BTC was trading around $17,000):
“I had a big party, [was] very happy with my best investment ever, but you know, we always return to the scene of the crime, right? So when it went down to $10,000, I thought ‘well, now, it’s more reasonable’, and I bought some at that time. and then it went down more to $6,000, bought about some more, and that’s where I am, where our average right now is around $9,000, and I’m not done. I’m not selling it. I think I’m gonna sit around for another five or ten years.“
