Mexican Billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego Says 70% of People Will Adopt Bitcoin

Salinas Pliego Drops a Bold Number

Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Mexico’s seventh-richest person, doesn’t make small calls. His latest prediction—that roughly 70% of the population will adopt Bitcoin—landed in a landscape where adoption curves already look nothing like the last cycle. Speaking in an original interview, the billionaire framed the number not as a distant hope but as an inevitable convergence of technology, monetary debasement, and shifting generational habits.

The number is aggressive. Even the most optimistic global surveys put crypto ownership somewhere in the low double digits. But Salinas Pliego isn’t surveying desk traders in New York or London. His lens is filtered through Latin America, where inflation has been a recurring tax on the unbanked and where stablecoins already move more volume than some traditional remittance corridors. A 70% figure stops sounding like hyperbole when you measure it against real-world necessity, not speculative appetite.

Why a Billionaire’s Voice Still Matters

Salinas Pliego isn’t a crypto founder looking for attention. He controls Grupo Salinas, a conglomerate spanning banking, retail, and media. When someone with that footprint says Bitcoin will become near-universal, markets listen—not because billionaires are oracles, but because their capital allocation often precedes wider institutional moves. His bank, Banco Azteca, was one of the first Mexican financial institutions to announce plans to accept Bitcoin, though regulatory hurdles slowed execution.

What’s different this time is the accumulation of external validation. Goldman Sachs quietly preparing for a crypto future isn’t noise. It’s a signal that the separation between legacy finance and digital assets is thinning. Salinas Pliego’s timeline may be aggressive, but the direction he’s pointing toward is no longer controversial in boardrooms. The real question isn’t if adoption cracks 50% globally—it’s which jurisdictions cross first, and what that reordering does to capital flows.

The LatAm Adoption Lens Changes the Math

Latin America hasn’t treated Bitcoin as a speculative toy in years. Countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and even Brazil have shown that when fiat rails break, citizens route around them. Mexico sits in a different bracket—less crisis-driven, more structurally layered—but the undercurrents are similar. Remittances, a lack of broad banking access, and a younger demographic that trusts apps more than teller windows all feed into adoption patterns that central bank surveys consistently miss.

Stablecoin dominance in the region is often cited as the main story, but it also acts as a gateway. Once a user holds USDT to preserve purchasing power, the step into Bitcoin becomes smaller, not larger. Salinas Pliego likely sees this as a funnel. His 70% forecast isn’t about everyone running full Bitcoin nodes; it’s about Bitcoin becoming the default settlement layer—visible or invisible—behind everyday payments and savings. That interpretation is far more credible than a mass speculative frenzy.

Macro and Regulatory Tailwinds Are Quietly Stacking

There’s a temptation to dismiss adoption forecasts as hopium unless they sync with structural shifts. Right now, several are converging. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have normalized exposure in retirement accounts. How U.S. regulatory frameworks are slowly aligning with crypto reality matters because it removes the institutional excuse of regulatory opacity. Even if rulemaking hasn’t fully arrived, the direction of travel is clearer in 2025 than it was in 2021.

Meanwhile, global liquidity cycles haven’t turned hostile yet. Central banks are easing—some cautiously, some desperately—and Bitcoin’s correlation with risk assets makes it a beneficiary of looser money, at least in the short to medium term. Salinas Pliego’s call lands in a window that combines macro acceptance with infrastructural readiness. It’s not the worst moment to be bold.

What Gets Missed: Adoption Isn’t Linear or Clean

Adoption curves rarely follow the smooth S-curves that consultants draw. They stall, spike, retreat, and regroup. The 70% figure should be read as an asymptotic endpoint, not a linear path. Salinas Pliego understands business cycles well enough to know that. What he’s betting on is the residual stay—users who enter during a crisis and never fully leave. That cohort has been quietly growing since the 2020 liquidity shock, and it’s sticky in ways that pure speculators aren’t.

Infrastructure is catching up. Lightning Network capacity, mobile-first wallets, and on-ramps that don’t demand a bank account are building the scaffolding for everyday usage. It’s unglamorous work that doesn’t make headlines, but it’s the substrate that turns billionaire predictions into something measurable. The market tends to overprice institutional headlines and underprice retail infrastructure—until infrastructure wins.

BTCUSA Insight

Salinas Pliego’s 70% forecast is less a number to take literally and more a signal about the confidence level inside the billionaire class. When someone who has weathered multiple currency crises, built a banking empire, and lobbied for Bitcoin adoption in a G20 economy says adoption will become ubiquitous, the market should pay less attention to the percentage and more to the capital flows that follow such conviction. The real story isn’t whether Bitcoin gets to seven out of ten people—it’s that the people with the most to lose from being wrong are already positioning for it.

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