Cathie Wood spoke to Bloomberg on Tuesday in a wide-ranging conversation on crypto, FTX, Elon Musk, and investing. She compared Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and shared her thoughts on Elon Musk, Twitter, and Tesla. Here are Wood’s nine best quotes from the interview. Loading Something is loading.
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Veteran investor Cathie Wood is not shy about sharing her outlook for cryptocurrency and investment strategies.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, the Ark Invest CEO explained why she remains bullish on bitcoin and crypto’s underlying technology, and also spoke about the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, and Ark’s optimism for Tesla.
Here are Wood’s 9 best quotes, lightly edited for length and clarity:1. “Many people are saying well, is this another Lehman, could we see the domino effect here?…Right now, we have it seems from FTX, $5-$10 billion in creditors, as FTX has filed bankruptcy they will be making claims. If you look at Lehman, that was $1.2 trillion in claims… This is fraud. This is Madoff. Madoff was $64 billion in claims. Again, FTX is 5 to 10 billion.”
2. “Yes, a lot of people have lost a lot of money. The crypto asset ecosystem is losing value here. But if we’re right on the underlying technology and the underlying roles that bitcoin and ether, ethereum, are going to play in this new world, then I think we’re going to recover pretty quickly.”
3. “I think the thing that is shocking is how many people were very close to [Sam Bankman-Fried]… the fact that so many people were completely fooled is quite shocking. You know, I think he had this aura around him or something that caused people to ask fewer questions than might otherwise been the case. It’s very hard to understand.”
4. “We do think bitcoin — and you can see through the behavior of the infrastructure it hasn’t skipped a beat, not one beat — it’s more secure than yesterday, the day before, the day before. I have a feeling [FTX’s collapse is] going to elevate bitcoin in the eyes of not only the crypto world but the investment world at large.”
5. “We think bitcoin is coming out of this smelling like a rose.”
6. “But if you look at that model longer-run, [Twitter] has not delivered on the promise. I think opening up the algorithm, which we think [Elon Musk] will do, and taking away the kind of human-driven censorship, and allowing the transparency of the algorithms that they do put out there, allowing people to question them, I think is going to be very healthy… I actually like what he’s doing.”
7. “You’ll remember that Elon started his entrepreneurial pursuits with a precursor to PayPal, so a very long time ago had this idea of a digital wallet, a super app like WhatsApp. We know he knows a lot about this world, and I think if anyone in the US can do this, I think he can. I think he’ll surround himself by the right business leaders. He’s not going to do this himself.”
8. “Think about the amount of data Twitter has, and think about the combination of that and artificial intelligence. Remember, [Musk] has AI expertise and experts… they are going to, I think, surprise and delight heading for a super app kind of product.”
9. “[Tesla is] grabbing a disproportionate share — and will continue to do so — of the market, that we think by 2027 will account for 85% to 95% of all cars sold in in the world.”