Jun 17, 2026, 2:00 p.m.
3 min read
Summary
- Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas has put about 70% of his investment portfolio into bitcoin, arguing that fiat currencies inevitably lose purchasing power.
- Salinas says he even persuaded his wife to mortgage her house to buy bitcoin and urges others to consider turning some home equity into bitcoin exposure, citing the cryptocurrency’s outperformance of real estate since 2016.
- Drawing on his family’s history in gold and their distrust of post-gold-standard fiat money, Salinas views bitcoin as a scarce asset akin to gold and believes it could eventually reach $1 million, though he is unsure when.
Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, whose net worth is estimated at roughly $5 billion, is a bitcoin maximalist.
He is so convinced that bitcoin is the best long-term investment that he holds 70% of his investment portfolio in the digital asset, believing that traditional fiat currencies are destined to lose purchasing power over time. The allocation is unusually large by conventional portfolio-management standards, where wealth advisers typically recommend limiting exposure to highly volatile assets.
Salinas — whose company, Grupo Elektra, is one of Mexico's largest business groups, expanding across retail, banking, telecommunications and media — has such a strong conviction on bitcoin that he once advised his wife to mortgage her home and buy more of it. And she did.
“I know this is a controversial topic, but I convinced my wife to mortgage the house that she has and take a loan to buy bitcoin,” Salinas told CoinDesk.
He says everyone should at least consider converting some of their home equity to bitcoin.
“For most people, the biggest investment, their nest egg, is their home equity. Find a way to transform that into some kind of bitcoin exposure to a larger or to a smaller degree,” he said. “So then you can bet on the asset of the house appreciating, the house asset appreciating, and the bitcoin asset appreciating.”
Salinas points to bitcoin's long-term appreciation relative to real estate as evidence for his view. In January 2016, the price of bitcoin hovered around $400. A house in Central London sold for an average price of $1.6 million or 4,000 bitcoin. With home prices remaining basically unchanged ten years later, that same purchase would require less than 30 bitcoin.
For Salinas, that comparison illustrates why he believes bitcoin outperforms traditional stores of value such as real estate over the long term.
"It's an asymmetrical bet to the upside," he said. “The more people find out about bitcoin, the more demand there will be."
The 'fiat fraud'
Salinas, who has emerged as a potential presidential candidate in Mexico for the 2030 election, traces his deep belief in fiat devaluation to a time long before digital currency even existed. Back when then-President Richard Nixon severed the U.S. dollar's direct convertibility into gold, ending the gold standard.
“The conversation at the family table, way back then, with my grandfather and my father was always about gold,” Salinas said, noting that "in the mid-1970s, the famous fiat fraud committed by Richard Nixon was, of course, a big issue at home.”
Salinas recalls how his dad and grandfather would passionately discuss gold and how its price would rise because governments around the globe “were just printing money like crazy, starting with the United States.”
And gold's performance over the following decades reinforced those concerns. In July 1976, gold traded at roughly $125 per ounce. Today, it trades at over $4,500. Its purchasing power has increased by about 500%. In contrast, the U.S. dollar buys only about 15% of what it did in 1976.
The family was not merely an observer, however, as the Salinas family has long been involved in the gold and silver mining business and would've been impacted by the abolition of the gold standard. Those dinner table conversations reinforced a simple lesson for Salinas: Scarce assets tend to hold their value, while fiat currencies lose purchasing power over time.
Salinas sees bitcoin as a modern extension of the same scarcity-based principles that first attracted his family to gold.
Despite bitcoin's extreme volatility, Salinas remains convinced it is one of the most attractive opportunities for investors, though he is reluctant to offer a short-term price prediction for the digital currency.
However, when pressed about what he thinks of predictions from other bitcoin bulls such as Cathie Wood and Michael Saylor, who say bitcoin could eventually reach seven figures, Salinas relented.
“So it will be a million dollars,” he said. “I just don't know when.”
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