Bitcoin's Biggest Billionaire Winners
B itcoin is soaring to the moon, with the cryptocurrency posting a new all-time high on Monday of $122,838, nearly a 100% increase since July of last year. For a brief time, Bitcoin's market cap was upwards of $2.4 trillion, surpassing Amazon as the fifth most valuable asset in the world.
The frenzy comes as investors eagerly await the outcome of what the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services calls 'Crypto Week.' Three bills being considered in the House of Representatives would help establish a regulatory framework and help integrate cryptocurrencies into traditional finance: the CLARITY Act, Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act and the GENIUS Act. 'These pieces of legislation further the President's pro-growth and pro-business agenda, and provide a clear regulatory framework for digital assets,' according to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
All this anticipation has helped produce outsized returns for BTC holders, with the coin's price far outpacing even the broader market, itself near record highs and up nearly 12% from a year ago. Here are a few of the biggest billionaire winners, including the largest holders of Bitcoin based on Forbes billionaire ranks, over the last year according to Forbes ' estimates. One person not among the gainers is Crypto's richest person Changpeng Zhao, whose fortune comes from his cryptocurrency exchange Binance but does not appear to own much Bitcoin.
No one would be richer or gain more from Bitcoin's rise than its mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto—if s/he really exists and is really one living person. With estimated holdings of up to 1.1 million Bitcoins, Satoshi's stash could now be worth more than $135 billion thanks to Bitcoin's all-time high. That would be good enough to make Satoshi the 11th-wealthiest person in the world, $10 billion richer than computer billionaire Michael Dell and just $7 billion poorer than Warren Buffett.
But the problem is that no one has been able to definitively prove the identity of Satoshi, who authored Bitcoin's white paper in 2008 before handing it off to the community and has never sold a token since. The pseudonymous person or possible team of people behind Satoshi Nakamoto left the stage more than a decade ago. That has not stopped many from trying to reveal the true identity in what has become one of the greatest unsolved mysteries. It's also impossible to determine an exact accounting of Satoshi's bitcoin addresses or total holdings since the network, too, is pseudonymous (Forbes previously reported estimates range between 600,000 and 1.1 million tokens). For those reasons, Forbes has yet to place Satoshi on the billionaires list, even as all those zeroes keep piling up.
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
Few are as bullish about Bitcoin as Saylor, who has made heavy investments in the coins through his publicly traded software firm MicroStrategy and his personal accounts. Microstrategy (market capitalization: $127 billion) owns 601,550 BTC, worth nearly $74 billion on Monday. That includes an additional 4,225 BTC bought at an average price of $111,827 per token from July 7th to July 13th, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing. In 2020, Saylor divulged that he personally held 17,732 BTC, purchased for some $175 million at an average price of $9,882. That stash would now be worth more than $2 billion. Brian Armstrong | $16.4 bil | + $5.2 bil
The CEO of Coinbase, Armstrong has been consistently selling stock through 2025 using an automated trading program, but still owns roughly 19% of the company he cofounded, helping him indirectly profit from the rise in Bitcoin's price like Ehrsam.
Michael Prince for Forbes Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss | $4.2 bil each | +$3.7 bil each
The Winklevoss twins hold an estimated 28,288 BTC, now worth roughly $3.5 billion. Famous for alleging Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook, the twins donated 15.47 Bitcoin apiece, worth $1 million each at the time, to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, citing issues with the Biden administration's approach toward cryptocurrency in a June 2024 post on X by Tyler Winklevoss. Mike Novogratz | $4.9 bil | +$2.4 bil
Novogratz is an early Bitcoin investor and the founder, CEO and majority shareholder of Galaxy Digital Holdings, a crypto investment firm that trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange. He first bought Bitcoin in 2013, and has invested in a wide variety of startups and tokens within the cryptocurrency industry. Fred Ehrsam | $4.2 bil | +$1.1 bil
Cofounder of Coinbase Global, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Ehrsam left the company in 2017 to found Paradigm, a cryptocurrency investment firm with more than $8 billion in assets. He remains on the board of Coinbase, and owns 4% of the shares, which trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and are up 81% over the past year—buoyed in part by Coinbase's corporate reserves of 51,017.36 BTC, worth $6.3 billion at Monday's all-time high price.
Getty Images Tim Draper | $3.6 bil | +$1.6 bil
Draper is a founding partner of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and an early Bitcoin investor. In 2014, he bought 29,656 bitcoins which were confiscated by U.S. Marshalls from the Silk Road black market; they're now worth over $3.6 billion.
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