“If you told me you owned all the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it?” Buffett said.
Compare that to a slightly different perspective: For an asset to have value, someone must be willing to pay for it.
As Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at University College London, explains in her book The Value of Everything, early economists distinguished between actual “value creation,” where new, socially useful resources were created, and “value extraction,” where money changed hands but nothing was produced.
Though Buffett is the world’s most famous value investor, that doesn’t mean he invests only in virtuous, socially beneficial companies—the kind of value Mazzucato talks about.
Buffett’s flavor of value investing involves buying stable, well-managed companies, but even his version of value investing has a complicated relationship with social value.