Kevin O’Leary on the Asset Class the Beat Everything Else in his Portfolio

**Kevin O'Leary** (0:00)
The country that has the best AI wins all the wars, has all the productivity, has the enhanced economy, and solves problems faster. And you don't want that to be China, because they don't believe in the same things we do. They'll use that to create the largest economy on earth, and worse, the best military on earth. So chop chop everybody, we gotta get going.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
First off, I gotta ask, what's around your neck right now?

**Kevin O'Leary** (0:31)
So, this is a Skybox Jordan.
Nine were made in 1997, PSA 6.5, cards worth around 5.2 million. Somebody bought this for nothing back in 1997
I love this asset class. It's appreciated better than any of my other indices, and I love wearing these things. This is so outrageous, it's so much fun. I wore this on the red carpet at the Oscars, this Tiffany case, paired it with a Rolex, which I think works beautifully, and an FP Journe. I mean, this stuff is too much fun, but I'm making money owning this. That's what I care about.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:10)
You are. And tell me what excited you and what got you into the collectible asset class, especially around sports cards.

**Kevin O'Leary** (1:16)
Michael Rubin was a guest shark on Shark Tank four years ago, and he said, you should go long collectibles. I said, you're crazy. I mean, a piece of cardboard for 20 million bucks. That's a joke. Then I found myself last August at 3 in the morning, bidding on dual logo man, Kobe Jordan Auto.
It was at 8 million when my wife went to bed. She said, if you buy that card tonight, don't come to bed.
And when we woke up, I paid 12.93 million for it. Today, that was last August, got bid 20 million for it. So tell me an asset class that does better than that, that's liquid. So if you're skeptical, you should be, but I love this asset class.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:00)
I can't imagine turning on Instagram or TikTok right now when people are not talking about Pokemon cards and sort of the entire class in general. What do you think it is about? Is it about passion that people have for these properties? Is it the IP? Is it just the fandom? Or is it just the appreciation and value?

**Kevin O'Leary** (2:16)
So I had one of my analysts go back 18 years and look at price appreciation of all collectibles, everything, to see where we should go into it. And what we found out was it looked identical to modern and contemporary art in the late 50s. And so 90% of the appreciation always attributes to the piece uniques. So you're better off to buy an oil Warhol for $30 million or a Picasso for $140 million, even though that Picasso traded for $120,000 in 58 You just want the rarest of the rare, rare, known pieces by collectors, this kind of a card, where you know there's only nine, this is two of nine, it's a known asset. Everything else just stays relatively flat. So you've really got to go into it the same way that art is. And it's also a lot of fun. There's a huge community around the world that they call it the hobby. I'm a newbie to it, but I'm partnered with Shine. He's probably the number one collector on earth, and a guy named Paul Warshaw. We've created an industry well past $120 million now, and it's our best performing index.
I'm an indexer because I do that with ETFs and everything else. This asset class has a long way to go.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:25)
The conversation out on the floor right now is all tokenization.

**Kevin O'Leary** (3:30)
Right.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:30)
So I'm just interested also in then how do you bridge from the physical to tokenizing the opportunity for the masses?

**Kevin O'Leary** (3:37)
Well, I believe in tokenization, and I have for the last 10 years.
Here's the problem.
Jill DeBrandt was just sitting here, was she not? She and Hagerty, they are the rock stars in DC right now. They have to get this infrastructure act passed, because tokenization will never be adopted by institutional index ever. Neither will Bitcoin, which is still a fringe asset to the big guys. I mean, it has to become compliant globally within the SEC, with an actual passage of a bill. When that occurs, it's going to change everything. But it hasn't happened yet, and the midterms are coming in November. The chance to pass this bill is now, even though there's a huge debate about interest or yield or awards on stable coins which were passed on Genius. Look what happened to stable coins. Almost immediately, they got adopted globally. Almost immediately, they don't pay yield in countries like Switzerland or France or Germany, but we are doing transaction now between geographies way better than the Fed wire. Instead of wasting three days, we're transacting in minutes at a fraction of the cost with full compliance and transparency. So right now, I'm using USDC because it's the one we started with, and I'm a shareholder in full disclosure and circle. So that's the one, but there's others to obviously tether and others. But that's what happens when the bill passes. So we need that to occur. Meanwhile, the tragedy since last October on all of the alt coins, and I call them pooh-pooh coins, they got slaughtered because the large institutions preparing for indexing, thinking the bill was going to pass at the end of October, figured out that 97% of the entire vol of the entire market is simply BTC and ETH. That's all you need to own. You don't need to own anything else. The one green field, the one monster opportunity, and nobody's been able to figure it out yet, is we've been talking about blockchain in the S&P 500 for almost 15 years.