Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed has joined a growing group of Bitcoin skeptics [bloomberg.com]:
Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed is joining the long line of skeptics saying bitcoin is a bubble as the digital currency continues to set record highs. "I just don't believe in this bitcoin thing. I think it's just going to implode one day. I think this is Enron in the making," Alwaleed told CNBC in an interview. "It just doesn't make sense. This thing is not regulated, it's not under control, it's not under the supervision" of any central bank, he said.
In his interview with CNBC, he said that the high price of Uber made Lyft a more attractive investment [cnbc.com]:
"We were in discussions with both Uber and Lyft, but when we evaluated both companies, we thought that Lyft is a better entry point for us. Because at that time, Uber's price was at a plateau of its highest height. So we invested in Lyft, and we have a very good relationship with .... the management," Alwaleed said in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box. "But Uber still is a great company, obviously, and Uber is the company that began with this whole idea of shared rides. Our choice was to go with Lyft but it doesn't mean that Uber is not good."
Alwaleed, who runs Kingdom Holding, made his comments on the heels of a Wall Street Journal [wsj.com] report that another Saudi fund, state-owned Public Investment Fund, was struggling to deal with a disappointing investment in Uber.
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Kingdom Holdings is remaining invested in Twitter but has reduced its stake in Apple:
Alwaleed said he thinks Twitter's rivals are monopolies. But while he has wound down his stake in Apple, he said he doesn't agree with calls for more regulation on big tech. "Clearly, behemoth companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — these are giants," Alwaleed said. "We have seen a lot of voices in the United States where we need to regulate what's happening on Facebook, and to a lesser extent on Twitter. ...We've seen in the '90s and early 2000s they were trying to break up Microsoft and it failed completely. I think it's a free market, there should be free competition."
Also at Reuters [reuters.com].