Bitcoin once dropped to $60,000 in the past two days, marking the largest single-day drop since the FTX scandal.
Michael Saylor's company, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), holds 713,000 Bitcoins at an average price of $76,052. As of last night, the unrealized loss was $6.5 billion. The stock price has plummeted from a high of $457 last year to $110, wiping out more than three-quarters of its value.
However, a year ago, Saylor graced the cover of the renowned magazine Forbes. The headline read:
The Bitcoin Alchemist. At the time, Bitcoin was priced at $104,000, and Saylor's net worth was $9.4 billion.
A picture circulating on Twitter shows three Forbes covers side-by-side, with Bitcoin's candlestick chart superimposed underneath. However, each cover is precisely printed with the starting point of a major price crash.
Of these three individuals, one has served time in prison, one is currently in prison, and the third just lost 6.5 billion yuan.
Cover photo taken amidst a bustling crowd.
The first crypto person to appear on the cover of Forbes was CZ.
In February 2018, Forbes featured a cover story called "Crypto's Secret Billionaire Club," with CZ standing in the center, wearing a hoodie and exuding a street-smart vibe. The small print on the cover read:
He went from zero to a billionaire in just six months.
At that time, Bitcoin had just fallen from nearly $20,000 at the end of 2017, and was priced at around $7,600. Forbes estimated CZ's net worth at least $1.1 billion. Binance, only six months after its launch, was already the world's largest exchange by trading volume.
After the cover was released, Bitcoin briefly rebounded to $10,000. And then nothing more.
By December 2018, Bitcoin had fallen to $3,156. From the day the cover story was published, the decline was:
58%.
CZ's story after that is well-known. In Forbes' 2025 list of the world's billionaires, CZ's net worth was $62.9 billion, ranking first in the crypto industry.
But he never appeared on the cover again.
The second person to appear on the cover of Forbes was Sam Bankman-Fried.
In October 2021, Forbes released its 40th annual Forbes 400 list of billionaires, with SBF on the cover. At under 30 years old, he had a net worth of $26.5 billion, ranking 41st among the richest people in the United States.
On the cover, he's wearing his signature gray T-shirt, has curly hair, and looks like a college student who just finished playing League of Legends all night.
Looking back now, the tone of that magazine seems almost surreal. Forbes called him "the most powerful man in the crypto industry," saying he was a combination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, building an exchange while simultaneously donating to charity.
When the cover was released, Bitcoin was around $60,000, just shy of its all-time high of $69,000.
Thirteen months later, FTX collapsed.
SBF misappropriated over $8 billion in customer funds to cover the losses of his other company, Alameda Research. In November 2022, a surge in user withdrawals overwhelmed FTX, which went bankrupt within a week, transforming itself from the world's third-largest exchange. Bitcoin plummeted from $20,000 to $16,000.
Finally, SBF was arrested in a luxury apartment in the Bahamas.
He was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Forbes later created a "30 Under 30 Hall of Shame," and SBF was prominently featured on it.
From the cover to the handcuffs:
13 months.
The third is Michael Saylor.
On January 30, 2025, Forbes featured him on its cover with the headline "The Bitcoin Alchemist." Shortly after Bitcoin broke the $100,000 mark, Saylor's net worth surged from $1.9 billion the previous year to $9.4 billion, nearly a fivefold increase. His company, MicroStrategy, saw its stock price rise by 700% in a year and was recently included in the Nasdaq 100 index.
The Forbes article recorded a detail:
On New Year's Eve, Saylor hosted a 500-person party at his Miami estate. Dancers waved orange Bitcoin orbs, and a 154-foot yacht named Usher was moored outside, responsible for bringing in institutional investors and crypto industry bigwigs.
At that time, Saylor said something to Forbes:
"We put a crypto reactor in the middle of the company, sucking in capital and spinning it. Volatility drives everything." This statement is certainly sincere. Saylor's alchemy, to put it bluntly, boils down to one thing: issuing bonds to buy cryptocurrencies.
When Forbes published the cover story, Bitcoin was worth $104,000. One year and six days later, it's worth $63,000. (Decline:)
40%.
Saylor said on the earnings call that Strategy has built a "digital fortress".
The last crypto mogul to call his company "Fortress" was SBF. That was in June 2022, and five months later FTX went bankrupt.
The cover is both a praise and a curse.
There's an old concept on Wall Street called the "magazine cover index":
When a trend makes it to the cover of a mainstream magazine, that trend has often come to an end.
The logic is simple. Forbes editors aren't prophets; like any retail investor, they only notice a story when it's at its most sensational.
The moment when a magazine feels that "someone in a certain industry deserves to be on the cover" is precisely the moment when market frenzy reaches its peak.
The cover is not the cause of the curse; the cover is a symptom of the bubble.
However, there is a brief exception to this pattern.
Last March, Justin Sun appeared on the cover of Forbes with the headline "Crypto Billionaire Who Made $400 Million for the Trump Family".
When the cover was released, Bitcoin was at $87,000. Instead of crashing, it rose all the way to $126,000 in October, a new all-time high.
The curse failed?
Not entirely. When Justin Sun appeared on the cover, it was only two months after Saylor's. One cover a month, one cover a month, the sheer number of crypto figures appearing on the covers of mainstream magazines is a signal in itself, indicating that the narrative of the entire industry has become so heated that even Forbes editors felt one issue wasn't enough.
When these covers start appearing in droves, in hindsight, there might be a list of symptoms indicating the peak of a bull market:
If Forbes is on the cover, taxi drivers are talking about crypto, and relatives are asking how you opened an account... if two out of these three signals appear, it's time to rethink your position.
Therefore, the real question isn't "Are Forbes covers accurate?", but rather:
When everyone around you is telling the same story, when the story is so good that even people who don't trade crypto have heard it, when mainstream media starts to glorify figures in an industry...
Are you someone who's still buying, or someone who's already selling?
The bull market didn't end in panic. It ended on the cover.
The big names on the cover can be changed, but I always end up paying the price for the long bear market.
