Billionaire investor Sam Zell questions Tesla and Bitcoin, predicts workers will

• Real-estate magnate Sam Zell cautioned the US dollar could be usurped as the world’s reserve currency in the next decade during a Real Vision interview this month.
• The billionaire investor also argued the working-from-home phenomenon will prove temporary, and expressed skepticism about Tesla’s valuation and Bitcoin’s prospects.
• Here are Zell’s 15 best quotes from the interview.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
  

  ---

Billionaire investor Sam Zell questioned Tesla’s valuation and Bitcoin’s worth, predicted many workers will return to offices, and warned the US dollar could cease to be the world’s reserve currency in the next decade during a Real Vision interview filmed on December 7 and released on Friday.

The founder and chairman of Equity Group Investments – who made his fortune buying up properties at discount prices in the 1970s, then cashing out just before the commercial real-estate market collapsed in 2008 – also underscored the need for dogged self-belief to succeed in life.

Here are Zell’s 15 best quotes from the interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:

1. “If you don’t know that you can’t, then almost anything is doable.”

2. “I didn’t know that a young kid at the University of Michigan couldn’t start a big real-estate company. I didn’t know that I couldn’t buy buildings. I didn’t know that I couldn’t rehab them. I didn’t know that I couldn’t sell them. Because nobody ever told me that I couldn’t. Everybody looked at what I did and said, ‘That’s crazy.'”

3. “I figured out that if nobody in the world agrees with me – if we are right, we get pretty serious margins.”

4. “My favorite 11th commandment is, ‘Thou shalt not take oneself seriously.’ You need to constantly challenge your own thoughts.”

5. “Open competition is a destruction of capital. In all of my investments, I have always been oriented toward barriers to entry. How do I protect myself from the insanity of others?”

Read More: BANK OF AMERICA: Buy these 26 cheap and fundamentally rock-solid stocks before the economic rebound sends them soaring in 2021

6. “We can look at some parts of the stock market today and say, ‘Everybody is crazy.’ I look at valuations and see extraordinary numbers that I can’t support.”

7. “If you move to Nowhere, Iowa, it’s five o’clock there every day. And what do you do at five o’clock? Go across the street to the pig farm? We are social animals.” – arguing that a mass exodus from cities isn’t realistic.

8. “All these people who today are thinking this is the end of office space and everybody’s going to work from home. I don’t know how to motivate by modem. ” – Emphasizing that urban centers have weathered financial crises, pandemics, and other disasters in the past.

9. “Everybody’s going to do Zoom…