Is Bitcoin Not Gonna Make It?

**Bill Cohan** (0:02)
This is, you know, a textbook example of how Wall Street IPOs are way overhyped.
And by the way, we're going to see the same thing with OpenAI, and we're going to see the same thing with Anthropic. So this is just the beginning of the season.

**Peter Hamby** (0:20)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Friday, June 26th. Today, I'm joined by Bill Cohan, who examines why Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies keep falling and falling, and whether big investors in the crypto space are risking too much by holding on.
And speaking of slumps, we also break down the price drop in SpaceX, which IPO just over a week ago to huge numbers, but has, pun intended, come back down to earth. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

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Happy Friday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today via Paris by my colleague Bill Cohan, who's here to talk about Bitcoin, here to talk about SpaceX, the things that people watching us on YouTube probably love to talk about. I'm looking at you, men under 30 Bill, I know it's really hot in Paris right now. I was a little late to this recording, so I'm sorry. Are you just there for vacation, and am I keeping you from dinner during this taping?

**Bill Cohan** (3:02)
We had dinner.
I abstained from the rosé so that I could be fully clear-headed for this important conversation. I will say I'm here. My wife has a conference in Antwerp. We're going to go to Antwerp tomorrow, so we thought we'd tack on some days in Paris, which is one of our favorite places. But unfortunately, it's this massive heat wave.
The apartment where we're staying has no air conditioning. It is really sweltering, even at 10 o'clock at night, and so that's the way it goes. But we'll make it through. I left Nantucket for this, where it was cool and breezy.

**Peter Hamby** (3:48)
For you.

**Bill Cohan** (3:51)
For me.

**Peter Hamby** (3:51)
I love Paris. I've been there for a couple of years, but I love this time of year. It's a surprise that it stays light out until 9 or 10 p.m., but at the same time, it probably makes your rental that much hotter.
Well, I know the number one thing you want to talk about after dinner avoiding Rosé in the heat in Paris is crypto, but Bitcoin is down, down, down, down. Every cryptocurrency is down. Donald Trump came into office, promising to be a champion of the crypto industry. That's not really happening. What are your big thoughts on why this is happening, and is the bottom not even here yet?

**Bill Cohan** (4:32)
Well, who knows with a speculative asset like Bitcoin, why it goes up, why it goes down. It's all dependent on quasi greater fool theory. I mean, you need somebody to come along, Peter, and buy your Bitcoin at a higher price, or else it's not going to happen. In other words, there's no income statement, there's no balance sheet, there's no future cash flows that you can discount back to try to arrive at some sort of valuation for Bitcoin. What it has going for it is, and having just done a documentary on this called Finding Satoshi, where we really plumb the depths of all of this. What it has going for it is sort of a fanatical fan base, and the fact that the supply is limited by fiat in a sense, it's limited to 21 million Bitcoins, so the supply is limited, and so it's very demand driven, so when the demand kicks in, the price goes up obviously. If you bought it in 2009 when it first appeared and held onto it, you've made so much money that you can't even believe it, but if you bought it last October when it was $120,000 per Bitcoin and now you own it at $60,000, you've lost half your value. So I think it's the ultimate speculative asset. It's a very intriguing asset.