On Wednesday (18 July 2018), in an interview with CNBC’s pre-market morning news show “Squawk Box”, Marc Lasry, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of hedge fund Avenue Capital Group (and co-owner of NBA team Milwaukee Bucks) said that he could see the Bitcoin (BTC) price rising to $40,000.

Speaking to CNBC from the “Delivering Alpha 2018” conference (sponsored by CNBC and Institutional Investor), the billionaire investor said that he could envision the Bitcoin price reaching $40,000 as Bitcoin gains wider adoption and it becomes easier to trade:

“You are hoping that as it gets more into the mainstream and as more markets allow it to trade where it’s freely tradable, to me, that’s more the market bet. I think then you will start seeing the price of it as it’s easier for people to buy. I think then you will have something that will end up being somewhere around $20,000-40,000.”

The hedge fund that Marc Lasry co-founded (with his sister Sonia Gardner) in 1995, Avenue Capital Group, which is headquartered in New York, specializes in distressed debt “and other special situations investments” in the United States, Europe and Asia. As of 30 June 2018, the global investment firm has approximately $9.6 billion assets under management.

With regard to his own personal interest in Bitcoin, Lasry had this to say:

“It was just something that I wanted to invest in… It’s speculative… It’s absolutely my personal money… You can’t say that crypto is distressed; that would be kind of hard! It’s around 1% [i.e. the percentage of Lasry family fortune invested in Bitcoin]… [I got in] a few years ago… I bought a lot more, I would say, in the last year, when probably the average price would be somewhere around $5000-7500… The reason I like Bitcoin is it’s the one where everyone is going to come to… everybody else is trying to make bets on different cryptos, which I actually think makes sense… I just think the one that is going to have the biggest market benefit is going to be Bitcoin.”

On 7 December 2017, Lasry told CNBC he regretted not buying Bitcoin sooner, saying that he should’ve bought it when it was at $300 just a couple of years ago:

“You know, the only thing I am upset about is why didn’t I buy it when it was at $300 or $500… You know, in the back of my mind, I am like ‘I should have bought that thing!’ and then I wanted to start buying it personally when it hit around $9,000-10,000… I was like ‘You know what? I’ll just wait for it to take a little dip, and it hasn’t taken a dip… It seems like a new currency is being created. Therefore, it might make sense to try to participate in it… I think it’s real.”

Featured Image Credit: Photo by “Thought Catalog” via Unsplash