Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham – co-founder of asset management firm GMO and one of Wall Street’s most prominent bubble spotters – came at Bitcoin again on Friday, calling the asset a “useless, speculative mechanism” destined for a slow decline into irrelevance.
Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk BoxGrantham predicted that Bitcoin will “go away, I suppose — not with a bang, but a whimper.” He said he has never owned Bitcoin and believes it will fall to zero, not through a sudden crash, but through a gradual erosion of interest over years and decades.
“All Bitcoin does is allow fraudsters to move money around,” he said.
Grantham pointed to Bitcoin’s volatility as evidence against its status as a store of value. The coin “halved for no particular reason in a strong economy,” he noted — a criticism with fresh teeth given where Bitcoin stands today.
Gold, he added, has delivered solid gains over the same period.
Perhaps Grantham is right, sales have been serious. BTC hit an all-time high near $126,000 in October 2025. Since then, the digital asset has shed more than 50% of its value. As of Friday, BTC was trading in the $60,000 range, testing what analysts consider a critical support zone that, if broken, could open a path to the $40,000s.
Bitcoin fell towards $62,000 in mid-June as hawkish signals from the Federal Reserve spooked risk markets. Rising geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and Iran sent oil prices higher and reignited inflation fears, pushing Fed officials to abandon any talk of rate cuts – with some floating the possibility of rate hikes. US spot BTC ETFs posted four consecutive days of net outflows totaling about $113.8 million.
Bitcoin’s attempt to regain higher ground ran right into its 200-day moving average, which acted as stiff resistance and triggered a roughly 30% decline from that ceiling. The current draw is among the 5th worst in Bitcoin history – territory that tests the resolve of long-term owners. However, some institutional buyers are treating the drop as an entry point, with Coinbase reporting that larger institutions have stepped in to buy the crash.
Another billionaire is betting big on bitcoin
On the flip side, Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego has placed 70% of his investment portfolio in BTC – up from just 10% in 2020 – and has even convinced his wife to mortgage their home to buy more.
The founder of Grupo Salinas traces his fiat currency skepticism to family dinner table conversations about Nixon ending the gold standard, and sees Bitcoin as superior to both cash and gold because it is unassailable and borderless.
His convictions have survived a $150 million loan fraud, regulatory setbacks to his plans to make Banco Azteca Mexico’s first Bitcoin-accepting bank and several market cycles.
He recently pointed to a decade of London property prices as proof of his thesis — a home that cost 4,000 BTC in 2016 now costs less than 30 — and is urging mainstream investors to convert their home equity into BTC exposure, calling it “an asymmetric bet on the upside.”