Hedge fund investor Anthony Scaramucci argues anyone who studies bitcoin carefully and understands the cryptocurrency will be convinced of its potential.
“Do the homework on bitcoin, understand what it is,” the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Monday. He suggested reading the white paper by the creator of bitcoin, among other materials.
“Anybody that does the homework … ends up investing into it. Look at Ray Dalio, a bitcoin skeptic, now a bitcoin investor,” he said, adding that other big-name investors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller have also bought bitcoin.
“These are brilliant guys [who] did the homework and drew a conclusion that they needed to own a piece of bitcoin,” he said.
Scaramucci said he sees bitcoin as “digital gold” and has “over $1 billion” in bitcoin, which he started accumulating last year. His firm announced a partnership last month that accelerates its move into the cryptocurrency world.
“If you had one cent in bitcoin and 99 cents in cash over the last decade, you outperformed everything. Just think about that,” he said.
Bitcoin hit an all-time high above $66,900 last week following the launch of the first U.S. bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund.
The cryptocurrency has seen wild swings and is expected to continue to be volatile. On Monday afternoon in Asia, bitcoin was up 2.6% at $62,696.00, according to Coin Metrics.
Separately, Scaramucci said the special purpose acquisition company linked to former President Donald Trump is “obviously a meme stock” at the moment.
Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp., which plans to merge with the Trump Media & Technology Group, soared last week.
“I would be very careful being long that stock and I’d also be very careful being short that stock,” Scaramucci said. “There might be a trapdoor in that stock at a moment’s notice, where, next thing you know, the bees are onto something else.”
He said the hype is “based on nothing other than the fact that it’s” Trump’s SPAC.
Last week, Scaramucci told CNBC that he hopes the SPAC does well.
“I want that thing to go up like another 10 times. The more it goes up, the less likelihood Donald Trump is running for president in 2024, so I’m rooting for that SPAC,” he said. Scaramucci served as White House communications director for a mere 10 days in July 2017 during the Trump administration.
— CNBC’s Jade Scipioni, Ryan Browne, Hannah Miao, Yun Li and Kevin Stankiewicz contributed to this report.
