Billionaire Salinas Wants to Build Mexico's First Bank to Accept Bitcoin

Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego said on Twitter today that the bank he founded, Banco Azteca, aims to become the first bank in Mexico to accept Bitcoin.

Founded in October 2002, the bank is one of the largest banks in Mexico, with more than 16 million savings accounts and more than 18 million credit accounts. Ricardo Salinas Pliego is the founder and chairman of the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Salinas.

With a net worth of $12.9 billion, Salinas ranks third among Mexico's richest people and 166th among the world's richest, according to Forbes.

In an interview with Jose Rodriguez of Bitcoin ATM provider Chainbytes, Salinas said Bitcoin is an asset that any investor should own, with value and an international market, with huge liquidity for trading around the world.

Earlier this year, Salinas joined the ranks of Michael Saylor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci in changing their Twitter profiles to "Bitcoin."

On November 17, 2020, Salinas recommended Saifedean Ammous's book "The Bitcoin Standard" to his 800,000 followers on Twitter, saying that "this is the best and most important book to understand Bitcoin." More interestingly, he revealed that 10% of his liquid assets are invested in Bitcoin.

In December 2020, he talked about Bitcoin in an interview. At the beginning of the interview, Salinas told the story of how he first heard about Bitcoin:

“I was invited to a conference in New York City. At the conference, a guy from Grayscale showed up. He told us about Bitcoin and it immediately caught my attention. I said ‘well, let’s give it a try and see what happens’. I invested a small amount of Bitcoin. It was 2013 and it was trading at $200 a coin.”

While Bitcoin initially attracted Salinas’ attention as a “payment tool,” he later realized that what really made Bitcoin valuable was its store of value.

Earlier today, in response to a tweet from MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, Salinas said Bitcoin is better than gold.

He sent out another tweet about Bitcoin, this time saying that Bitcoin is a "great way to diversify your portfolio" and that he believes "any investor should start looking into cryptocurrencies and their future" to fight inflation.