ByDan Alexander,
Forbes Staff.
onald Trump, the crypto skeptic-turned-“chief crypto advocate,” became one of the world’s biggest bitcoin investors this summer, when his Trump Media and Technology Group purchased $2 billion of the cryptocurrency. On stage at a bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, one day after news of the plan became public, first son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t help but gloat. “I think you saw, all, the announcement yesterday,” he said, his voice rising like a politician anticipating applause. “We’re very long crypto. I mean, it’s a huge part of everything that we do right now.”
The price of bitcoin had just jumped 57% in a year, and Don Jr. predicted it would increase about 35% to 60% more in the year to come. Next to him on stage, his brother Eric foresaw a 55% jump. A half year later, those calls look like signs of an overheated market. From the time Trump Media purchased its pile of bitcoin in July, the cryptocurrency is down an estimated 12%. The president, in turns out, got in at the top, or pretty close to it.
Volatility is inherent in crypto, as Donald Trump pointed out in 2019. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he tweeted at the time. Five years later, with crypto money pouring into the 2024 election, he changed his tone. “You are the modern-day Edisons and Wright brothers and Carnegies and Henry Fords,” he told a gathering of bitcoin enthusiasts in Nashville.
