Greg Beard ranks among Wall Street’s most successful natural resource investors of the past two decades. He notched a superstar career buying and selling oil and gas companies at Apollo Global Management, then picked Bitcoin as gusher for the ages. Beard’s co-founded what’s slated to become one of world’s largest Bitcoin mining outfits in the old-time Pennsylvania coal fields. Today, the 50-year old adventurer views Bitcoin’s 40% decline from its October peak of over $60,000 as a matchless buying opportunity. “It’s hard to know where Bitcoin’s price will be at, say, the end of the year,” he told Fortune in a phone interview from a family ski vacation in France. “But if you’re a fundamental-style investor that believes in Bitcoin as a store of value, it should be worth multiples of today’s price in five years, I’d say at least five times.” If he’s right, the lead cryptocurrency would be selling for at least $200,000 by the spring of 2027. Beard sees momentum building rapidly as folks and funds increasingly believe that Bitcoin’s the ideal fortress for protection against an inflation-ravaged dollar. “The better Bitcoin does, the more interest it will generate,” he says. “We’ll see a compounding effect.”
Beard also gives Bitcoin the edge over gold. “I’m not putting gold down, it’s a 2000 year success story,” he notes. “But when its price rises sharply, more gold shows up. The number of Bitcoin is fixed forever at 21 million. It also has the edge over gold because it can be used for no-friction buying and selling of goods and services.” As a Bitcoin super-bull, Beard naturally sees his favorite far outperforming the S&P 500 and NASDAQ in the years ahead. But to outpace those markets, he admits, Bitcoin will need to shed the way it now trades, which is more like a super-high risk growth stock than the better-than-bullion vehicle that offers both big price growth and a thick shield against hard times. “For its price to take off,” he says, “Bitcoin needs to graduate from its strong correlation to the Cathie Wood crowd and high-priced, high-tech equities.”
