Citadel CEO Ken Griffin says it was a “mistake” not to buy crypto sooner, but that doesn’t mean he’s suddenly a fan of Bitcoin.
“Of course, I wish I bought something that trades at 100 times the price it traded at a few years ago,” the billionaire investor told Andrew Ross Sorkin during the New York Times DealBook Summit 2024. “We all have FOMO. It’s just universal, it’s part of human psychology.”
The conversation took place the same day Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time. The cryptocurrency has surged following President-elect Donald Trump’s election win and subsequent announcements about his second term’s priorities around deregulation.
Griffin told the Times that the environment surrounding Trump’s win, as well as Republicans taking the House and Senate, is part of an attitude of Americans seeking “agency” in their lives.
“I think that one of the things that we did see over the course of this election cycle, was American people saying, ‘I want to have agency in my life,’ and crypto is part of that,” Griffin said.
This isn’t the first time Griffin, who once called crypto “a jihadist call” against the dollar, has said he was wrong on the matter. In a 2022 interview, he admitted the valuation of the crypto market “tells you that I haven’t been right on this call.”
Still, he questions the long-term stability of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, questioning how well the structure has really captured the “zeitgeist of the world.” Griffin also repeated something he’s said many times before: He doesn’t understand the real need for crypto.
“What I don’t care for about crypto is, what problem does it solve for our economy?” he asked. “What problem does it solve?”