Gaffes of the great: Some of the biggest failed predictions about everything from the internet to Bitcoin

An occasional loose remark by an intellectual giant needn’t be held against him/her. Yet the history of bad predictions makes us sceptical about their pronouncements.

Charlie Munger doesn’t like cryptocurrencies. Last week he declared: “I wish they’d never been invented.” As vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Munger’s voice carries weight.

Yet the history of great men and women passing early judgement on an emerging trend does allow one to entertain the faint doubt that maybe, just maybe, even this redoubtable investor might be proven wrong.

Charlie Munger of course isn’t the only worthy to have stuck his neck out. There are several instances of great men and women making famous predictions only for them to be completely unfounded.

Also read: What Warren Buffett said about Crypto, Robinhoods, and SPACs in May AGM

In 1998, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman predicted that the growth of the internet would slow down drastically. “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s,” he declared. We know how that one went. Krugman later did explain that his comment wasn’t supposed to be taken too seriously and was meant to be fun and provocative. And let’s not forget, he did call the housing bubble in the US at least three years before it finally burst.

Sure, an occasional loose remark by such an intellectual giant needn’t be held against him. But then in 2013, Krugman was back at it, this time expressing scepticism about Bitcoin as a real store of money, and doubting if it would actually work as a currency. Bitcoin recently crossed a market cap of $2 trillion before dropping to $900 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, which means that had it been a company, it would have been in the league of  Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet.

Some years before Krugman, there was the 16th-century clairvoyant Nostradamus whose sensational prediction about the world coming to an end in the seventh month of the year 1999, held us in terrified thrall for years. That is, till August 1999 when it dawned on the world that the great seer’s prophecy hadn’t gone to plan.

But Nostradamus doesn’t hold a candle to American radio evangelist Harold Camping who used biblical numerology to predict the end of the world a dozen times, blaming math each time he got it wrong. He even published a book titled 1994?, suggesting when it would all end. He revised it, the prediction not the book, subsequently to two failed dates in 2011 at which point the world just decided to ignore him.

But it is to business, which relies after all on precision and accuracy, that we must turn for our biggest gaffes. And what a glittering galaxy of names we have here.

In September 1929, well-known economist Irving Fisher declared "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Three days later, the US stock market plunged into a historic collapse and The Great Depression had gripped the world.

Then there’s Steve Ballmer, the former chairman of Microsoft, who in 2007 didn’t think the iPhone would appeal to too many customers “because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good e-mail machine". Just five years later, iPhone sales alone were greater than Microsoft’s overall revenue. Any wonder that in 2008 Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo for $47 billion. Luckily for Microsoft, he failed.

Technology, in particular, has been harsh on the many men who have tried to map its trajectory. Here’s Ken Olson, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), predicting in 1977: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Needless to add, PCs made history, while DEC sold out to Compaq in 1998.

But there’s nothing to  beat the calm reassurance of World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on the eve of the worst outbreak of a pandemic in the last 100 years. There was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus, said the man on 2 February 2020. He had also waited till the end of January for declaring it an emergency!

That’s the kind of chutzpah which makes even the ex-health minister of India, who declared the country was in the endgame of the war on Covid in March this year, look good.