I mentioned Michael Novogratz a couple weeks ago in my post about the billionaire scam, “Mike Novogratz, like others on this list, has a remarkable ability to lose investors’ money and fail, but remain rich.”
That didn’t take long for Mr. Baldy, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Waterworld villain, to earn his title.
He went dark on Twitter after one of the coins he promoted, Luna, collapsed to zero.
Whoops.
He’s back now after his hiatus, writing:
Alts are down over 80 percent from the highs. In 2017 it was over 95 percent.
That is down another 70 percent.
My point is picking bottoms is dangerous and if you do scale in slowly.
— Mike Novogratz (@novogratz) May 20, 2022
Except the majority of those coins never recovered even though Bitcoin went to $60k. Investors in those coins in 2017-2018 lost everything and never recovered, except for Ethereum and a few others. What happened was, those 2017 coins died in 2018-2019, and in 2020-2021 were replaced by new coins for new victims, and now those coins are dying too. That’s why there are thousands of alt coins and almost all of the are worthless. Are Luna investors ever going to see their money again? Of course not. So this is terrible advice.
And also MicroStrategy Stock also collapsed since then too. So that’s two billionaires in one week.
I got nothing against billionaires per say. My complaint is not that billionaires threaten democracy: they don’t have enough power to do that even if they wanted to, and it wouldn’t be in their interests anyway given that neoliberal democracy is the system which made them rich in the first place and is keeping them rich. My argument is that most billionaires are overpaid relative to their skill/ability or value they produce, which represents a major market inefficiency. This is $ that could be going to clients, shareholders, investors…except it’s going in the billionaire’s pocket for terrible results. It’s like why is this guy or gal (in the case of Cathie Wood) so rich when his advice sucks and there plenty of people who are more talented can do the billionaire’s job for free or much less money.
Tiger Woods is super rich, but I don’t think anyone disputes his talent and the value he brings to his sponsors, fans, and the PGA. Yet someone like Michael Saylor is still a billionaire despite nothing but a history fraud and failures. The sports equivalent of Michael Saylor would be like someone who earns Lebron’s salary but cannot even win at 1 on 1 against a high schooler.
A counterargument is that billionaires will lose the most in any market decline, being that they also have the most money. Seems obvious enough. Except that there is no assurance Bitcoin and related investments will recover. I think it’s much more likely that Tesla, Google, and Facebook stock will make new highs before Bitcoin does, and those will be much better investments decades from now compared to Bitcoin. Stocks have a 100+ year history of going up. Bitcoin has only been around for a decade. Also, it doesn’t change the possibility that these people are overpaid relative to skill.
The way crypto has collapsed they would have been better off buying bonds funds, even with this horrible inflation.