Billionaire investors try some crypto

If you’ve ever brought up crypto at Thanksgiving dinner, you know that people either love it or loathe it. It’s the ambrosia salad on the financial dinner table because: a) it’s divisive and b) even investors who hate it put some on their plate.

Warren Buffett – chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway – infamously warned that crypto was “rat poison” a few years ago. His billionaire deputy sidekick, Charlie Munger, also compared it to a “venereal disease” in February. But four months later, the multinational conglomerate clumsily dropped in the group chat that it had invested $1 billion in Nubank, a Brazil-based digital bank that is launching its own crypto token in early 2023.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called cryptocurrencies “decentralized Ponzi schemes,” continuing earlier comments that he thinks it’s all “fool’s gold” with “no intrinsic value.” Contrary to his statements, JPMorgan is taking biotin to grow out its crypto bull horns:

• JPM hired its first executive director of digital asset regulatory policy last week. It’s none other than former head of policy and regulatory affairs at now-bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, Aaron Iovine. Which one…🧐.
• The bank has been offering crypto investment funds since 2021 and launched its own digital currency, JPM Coin, in 2019.

Other billionaires have also done crypto double-takes: Carl Icahn went from calling cryptocurrencies “ridiculous” to teasing a $1.5 billion investment in it last year (no update there). Even Mark Cuban went from telling Forbes he’d “rather have bananas” at the end of 2019 to calling himself a crypto “evangelist” this year.

There has been no public comment from Buffett or Munger about changing their personal beliefs about crypto (we’ll be smashing CTRL+F in Buffett’s 2022 letter to shareholders for every mention of Nubank in February).

Meanwhile, Dimon has been up front with the press about maintaining his personal disdain for crypto even as his company edits its logo to have little laser eyes (jk). “I personally believe that bitcoin is worthless,” Dimon said at an Institute of International Finance event earlier this month. But then he also said: “Our clients are adults. They disagree. That is what creates markets. So if they want to have access to buy themselves [sic] bitcoin, we can’t store it, but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible, access.”

Bottom line: Crypto is too big to ignore, and crypto winter means holiday sales for investors.—JW