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January 25th, 2023
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Early bird gets the worm: Bitcoin and the wealthy
Financial Times | Eva Szalay | Jun 13, 2021
Quick on the draw: a decade on from first investing, Sandra Ro has made a substantial fortune from bitcoin © Pascal Perich
The very rich are adding fuel to the bitcoin boom but many are wary of a bubble
Ten years ago, Sandra Ro was working in finance in London when some currency-trading friends told her about bitcoin. The cryptocurrency had been released only a couple of years previously and was still far from a global phenomenon.
“Bitcoin was only really known in geeky tech circles and eventually currency traders in London found out about it around 2010,” says Ro. She invested in the cryptocurrency, made a substantial fortune and is now chief executive of the Global Blockchain Business Council, a Swiss non-profit organisation that promotes the technology behind cryptocurrencies.
With a background in markets at global banks such as Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, Ro was quick to grasp blockchain’s revolutionary potential. “What really piqued my interest was whether the tech could disintermediate financial markets. I thought, what the heck?” she recalls. “Bitcoin was trading at a couple of hundred bucks at the time and I bought a bunch thinking, what if it works? And guess what? It did!”
See: El Salvador approves Bitcoin as legal tender – the first country to do so
Clearly, what makes the crypto field tempting are the stories of those who have struck gold. Ro is reluctant to say how much she is worth as a result of her bitcoin punt, as she has been targeted by scammers and has received death threats after talking about the subject. But she was able to leave full-time banking in 2017 — the year of bitcoin’s first significant rally, when prices rose from just above $800 to almost $20,000. Bitcoin’s surge to $63,000 earlier this year increased Ro’s fortune.
“Let’s just say, I have done very well. I have gone from being a banker to working at a non-profit,” says Ro, who studied at Yale and Columbia universities. “Getting in early because the tech seemed really cool also worked out as an investment, so that’s also pretty cool.” Being an early investor meant she has had to try a dozen exchanges, suffered hacks and been locked out of investments. Her friends have also done well from her foray, as she recalls giving them bitcoin “just to test out how it works”.
“I wasn’t surprised by bitcoin doing well, but there were always a lot of risks. There were hacks, regulatory risks and exchanges going bust,” she says. “Crypto used to be messy. Now there are multimillion-dollar companies being built.”
See: What are all the proliferating Cryptocoins for?
Another early believer is Olivier Janssens, a Belgian-born entrepreneur who states his profession on LinkedIn as an investor in bitcoin since 2010. He is also proudly “self-educated” with an attraction to “libertarian and voluntarist” ideas and forged a career as a software entrepreneur. In 2014, when bitcoin was trading at around €600, he became the first person to pay for a flight by private jet with the cryptocurrency. He settled the bill for the trip from Brussels to Nice with, he estimates, 15 bitcoin — in hindsight, a pretty costly trip. “[That] would be worth about €400,000 today,” he says.
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