Investment company Berkshire Hathaway, founded and led by American billionaire Warren Buffett, has made huge gains this year from shares in Nubank, a fintech bank that also works with cryptocurrencies, Markets Insider reports.

The Brazilian bank’s share price is up 93% year-to-date, making it the best-performing investment in Berkshire’s portfolio in 2023.

Buffett’s company first invested $500 million in Nubank in June 2021, and then another $250 million in December of the same year, when it was listed on the US stock market.

The investment was attracted at the time because Buffett is known to be a fierce critic of cryptocurrencies, and Nubank, the largest fintech bank in Latin America, allows cryptocurrency transactions on its online platform.

In addition, this year the bank launched its own digital token.

Buffett, a fierce critic of cryptocurrencies

In an interview with Fox Business in 2018, the American billionaire described cryptocurrencies as “probably rat poison.” Also, speaking about Bitcoin’s impressive growth that year, he said in an interview with CNBC financial television that:

“Raising the price really creates more buyers and people think ‘I’ve got to get in on it too’ and it’s better if they don’t get it [criptomonedele]. If you don’t understand them, you’re more excited than if you did.”

“I have no bitcoins. I do not own any cryptocurrency and never will. Although I can create a Warren coin, maybe I can create it and say there will be 21 million [de monede]. You can have them after they die, but you can’t do anything with them except sell them to someone else,” the billionaire said in another CNBC interview two years later.

Last year, he told Berkshire Hathaway’s AGM that he wouldn’t give $25 for “all the bitcoins in the world,” rhetorically wondering what to do with them.

Charles Munger, his right-hand man at the investment company, in turn called Bitcoin and other digital currencies “worthless” and “a tool used by criminals.”

Amazon and Apple are among Berkshire’s other high-yielding investments

However, Markets Insider notes that since Nubank’s stock is only a fraction of Berkshire’s $350 billion total portfolio, it’s highly likely that the decision to bet on the bank was made by one of the two managers, Buffett’s investment, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler.

Berkshire’s total position in Nubank is now about $840 million after its share price nearly doubled from $4 earlier in the year.

Other investments that have produced impressive returns for Buffett’s company this year include Amazon (+57%) and Apple (+39%), the company that represents the largest share of his portfolio.

Instead, in 2023, the American billionaire lost money on some of his favorite companies, such as Coca-Cola (-14%), Kraft Heinz (-18%) and Bank of America (-17%).