Although George Soros once described Bitcoin (BTC) as a “typical bubble,” comparing it to the ‘tulip mania’ that engulfed The Netherlands in the mid-1600s and expressing worries about its volatility, his views seem to have changed since then. Today, his investment firm even owns some of the flagship decentralized finance (DeFi) asset.
As it happens, in the summer of 2021, it became public knowledge that Soros Fund Management, the asset management company founded by the billionaire investor and philanthropist, received the green light from its CIO, Dawn Fitzpatrick, to trade “Bitcoin and perhaps other cryptocurrencies,” although Soros himself did not offer any comment, as Finbold reported on June 30, 2021.
Supporting crypto
However, his support for crypto had become obvious earlier in April 2021, when he joined a $200 million fundraising round for a Bitcoin financial technology business New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), as a strategic investor alongside MassMutual, FS Investments, and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), among others, demonstrating an increase in the institutional adoption of Bitcoin.
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More recently, Soros’s fund has increased its exposure to the crypto industry, as it purchased $8,984,659 in convertible notes of crypto miner Marathon Digital Holdings convertible into 39.6 million common shares, according to a 13F filing with the United States Securities and Exchange (SEC) dated to December 31, 2022, and revealed in February 2023.
On top of that, earlier information has revealed that Soros Fund Management also owned call options and put options on 50,000 shares of enterprise business intelligence (BI) software vendor MicroStrategy. This could be equal to holding Bitcoin through a proxy because of the company’s massive crypto purchases, which Hal Press, the founder and CEO of the crypto-focused investment fund North Rock Digital criticized harshly.
Although the billionaire’s private crypto holdings are unknown, Alex Jones alleged he had rejected $5 million in Bitcoin from Soros to pump the digital asset, as he told Joe Rogan in an episode of the ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ in February 2019. If Jones was truthful, and taking into account its average price in 2018, Soros owned at least 760 BTC at the time, which today would be worth around $23 million.
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