Markets Are Musk’s ‘Toy’ As Mania Hits ‘Whippet In A Turtleneck’ Phase

"If Bitcoin continues to fall, it would be just one more warning shot that P/Es may be peaking," Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson said earlier this week. "If Bitcoin is able to make new highs, it likely means the speculative frenzy isn’t over." That was on Monday. Suffice to say the "speculative frenzy" wasn't over. Four sessions of abject insanity later, the crypto crowd (which is, in some respects, indistinguishable from the crowd that drove shares of GameStop, AMC, and other vagrants into the

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12 thoughts on “Markets Are Musk’s ‘Toy’ As Mania Hits ‘Whippet In A Turtleneck’ Phase

  1. Maybe Jack Ma thought the same? And then Xi Jinping reminded him that, no, after all, he was just a successful shopkeeper.

    If the US authorities want to clip Elon Musk’s wings, they got nothing but choice…

    1. I don’t think that’s comparable. “Behave yourself” means something totally different coming from Beijing than it does from Washington, or at least when it comes to individual citizens with a high profile. That’s not to say the US government isn’t capable of conveying the message. It’s just to say that it would be much more difficult to convey that kind of implicit threat in the US to someone like Musk than it is for Xi to convey it in China to Ma.

    1. I mean it was literally invented for random people to hand out as cheap as free likes on forums. It literally is supposed to be essentially worthless. Whatever you want to say about Crypto in generally, Doge was supposed to be a joke and basically free. Since it happens to offer entertainment value it’s always been worth slightly more than 0.

  2. H., I don’t practically disagree with your views on crypto, or the implication of your question, namely that [most] crypto users don’t want ‘crypto’ as such but are merely engaging in arbitrage for gain measured in ‘dollars’ or other nation-state currency. However, the facts are that crypto trades in anything. One doge is worth 1 sat, currently, for example. That statement may be ‘meaningless’ to most people now and forever. But it doesn’t have to be. Not any more than ‘one USD is X EUR’ was meaningless before 1999.

    People seem to prefer/need ‘real’ currencies now, and they always may. If you don’t completely discount a future where a growing number of people prefer bitcoin (at whatever personal ‘cost’ to their portfolios, etc.), then you are missing part of the potential of btc, or other cryptocurrency. People have and continue to live completely off of crypto. Is this a growing, static, or ephemeral phenomenon? I don’t see how anyone can say with such certainty. That’s the investment case. Moreover, other cryptos have different value propositions. The developments on etherium (like layer-2 of btc) have wild use-case potential. Does that make ether at all valuable in the future? That will be dependent on the price of etherium network time/power and ether supply. Fortunately, that will be something which is easy to put a ‘price’ on, to etherium’s merit or detriment.

    Finally, you often make the cogent and urgent point that BTC will face regulation. And certainly BTC can become too onerous to hold for all but hodler-stalwarts if China or USA/dependents make it so. This will be a fun space to watch, however, because the regulatory power of any government shouldn’t be overstated. Bill Clinton was at the whim of bond traders, and Soros bullied the Brits. Capital flows are the blood of the world and Crypto is neovascularization. Any effort to stifle it will be inherently dangerous. Finally, forex is the largest market in the world. The sandbox should be big enough for innovative forms of exchange.

NEWSROOM crewneck & prints