Being on the cover of Forbes, why did it become a market curse for crypto giants?
By Curry, Deep Wave TechFlow
Original title: Forbes Editorial Office, the most accurate shorting signal in the coin industry?
Bitcoin once reached $60,000 in the past two days, and it also recorded the biggest one-day decline since the FTX explosion.
Michael Saylor's company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) holds 713,000 bitcoins at an average price of $76052. As of last night, there was a loss of 6.5 billion dollars. The stock price fell from a high of $457 last year to $110, and more than three-quarters has evaporated.
However, a year ago, Saylor was on the cover of the famous magazine Forbes. The headline reads:
The Bitcoin Alchemist, Bitcoin Alchemist. Bitcoin was worth $104,000 at the time, and Saylor's net worth was 9.4 billion.
Now, a picture is circulating on Twitter, with the covers of the three Forbes issues arranged together, with Bitcoin's K line superimposed on the bottom. However, every cover was accurately printed at the starting point of a round of sharp decline.
And these three people, one has been to jail, one is in jail, and the third just lost 6.5 billion dollars.
The cover was taken when the crowd was in full swing
The first crypto person to get on the Forbes cover was CZ.
In February 2018, Forbes made the cover of an issue called “Crypto's Secret Billionaire Club”. CZ stood right in the middle, pull-on his sweater, and looked flirty. The small print on the cover reads:
It only took 6 months to go from zero to a billionaire.
At that time, Bitcoin had just dropped from close to $20,000 at the end of 2017, and the price was around $7,600. Forbes estimates that CZ has a minimum net worth of $1.1 billion. Binance has only been online for half a year and is already the largest exchange in the world by trading volume.
After the cover came out, Bitcoin briefly rebounded to $10,000. And then there was no afterward.
Bitcoin dropped to $3156 by December 2018. Calculated from the day the cover was issued, the decline:
58%
Everyone knows the story after CZ. On the Forbes 2025 Global Billionaires List, CZ has a net worth of $62.9 billion and is number one in the crypto industry.
But he's not on the cover anymore.
The second Forbes cover was Sam Bankman-Fried.
In October 2021, Forbes released the 40th Forbes 400 Rich List, with SBF as the cover character. Under 30, he has a net worth of $265 billion and is the 41st richest person in the US.
On the cover, he was wearing that iconic grey t-shirt with curly hair, and looked like a college student who had just played League of Legends all night long.
The tone of that issue is very magical when I look back now. Forbes called him “the most powerful person in the crypto industry,” saying that he is a combination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley while building an exchange and donating money to charity.
When the cover was released, Bitcoin was around $60,000, just one step away from its all-time high of 69,000 at the time.
FTX exploded 13 months later.
SBF misappropriated over $8 billion in client funds to fill a hole in his other company, Alameda Research. In November 2022, users concentrated on withdrawals, FTX was unable to pay, and within a week it went from being the third-largest exchange in the world to a bankrupt company. Bitcoin went straight from $20,000 to $1.6K.
Finally, SBF was arrested in a luxury apartment in the Bahamas.
He was convicted on all seven counts, and the sentence was 25 years. Forbes later made a special “30 Under 30 Hall of Shame,” and SBF was definitely on the list.
From covers to handcuffs:
13 months.
The third one is Michael Saylor.
January 30, 2025, Forbes cover, titled “The Bitcoin Alchemist.” Shortly after Bitcoin broke through $100,000, Saylor's net worth rose 5 times faster from 1.9 billion the previous year to 9.4 billion. Shares of his company, MicroStrategy, have risen 700% in a year and have just been included in the Nasdaq 100 index.
The Forbes article recorded a detail:
On New Year's Eve, Saylor hosted a 500-person party at her estate in Miami. The dancer waved a Bitcoin orange ball of light, and a 154-foot yacht called Usher was parked outside, responsible for bringing in institutional investors and the biggest names in the crypto industry.
At the time, Saylor told Forbes:
“We put a crypto reactor in the middle of the company, suck capital in and spin it around. Volatility drives everything.” This statement is of course sincere. Saylor's alchemy, to put it bluntly, is just one thing: issuing bonds to buy coins.
Bitcoin was $104,000 when the Forbes cover came out. Today, one year and six days later, 63,000. Decline:
40%
Saylor said during the earnings call that Strategy has built a “digital fortress.”
The last crypto mogul to call his company “Fortress” was SBF. It was June 2022, and FTX went bankrupt five months later.
The cover is both a compliment and a curse
Wall Street has an old concept called “magazine cover index”:
When a trend hits the covers of mainstream magazines, it often comes to an end.
The reason is simple. Forbes' editors aren't prophets; like all retail investors, they only notice a story when it's at its most lively.
The moment that makes a magazine think “someone in a certain industry deserves to be on the cover” is just the moment when the market fervor is at its peak.
The cover is not the cause of the curse; the cover is a symptom of a bubble.
There is, however, a brief exception to this rule.
Last March, Sun Yuchen appeared on the cover of Forbes with the title “The Crypto Billionaire Who Helped the Trump Family Earn $400 Million”.
Bitcoin was $87,000 when the cover came out. Not only did it not collapse, but instead it went all the way up to 126,000 in October, a record high.
Has the curse failed?
Nor is it entirely. When Sun Yuchen was on the cover, it was only two months since Saylor's one. The January 1, March 1, and the fact that crypto characters are on the covers of mainstream magazines is itself a signal that the entire industry's narratives are so hot that even Forbes editors don't feel that one issue is enough.
When the covers start piling up, if you think about it later, there may be a list of symptoms at the top of the bull market:
Forbes came out on the cover, taxi drivers talked about coins, relatives asked you how to open an account... Two of the three signals appeared, so it's time to think about your position.
So, the real question to ask isn't “whether the Forbes cover is accurate”, but rather:
When everyone around you is telling the same story, when this story is so good that even people who don't trade coins have heard it, when the mainstream media starts to envy people in an industry...
Are you the one who's still buying, or the one that's already selling?
The bull market didn't end in a panic. The bull market ended on the cover.
It's just that the big guy on the cover can be replaced, but I always pay for the long bear market.
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