On Tuesday (May 12), Joe Kernen, who is a co-anchor of CNBC’s morning news and talk program “Squawk Box“, casually disclosed (during an interview with billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya) the fact that he is a Bitcoiner.

Here is his bio:

“Prior to his anchoring duties, Kernen was CNBC’s On-Air Stock Editor and was featured throughout the business day on CNBC.

Kernen came to CNBC in the 1991 merger with Financial News Network, having joined FNN after a 10-year career as a stockbroker.

After training at Merrill Lynch, he rose to the level of vice-president at both EF Hutton and Smith Barney. Focusing on small-to-medium-sized corporations, he managed corporate cash accounts and qualified retirement plans in addition to key employees’ personal assets.”

Yesterday, Kernen interviewed billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who is the founder and CEO of investment firm Social Capital, as well as Chairman of space flight company Virgin Galactic.

During the interview, while Kernen was telling Palihapitiya about billionaire macro investor Paul Tudor Jones II’s apearance on the program a day earlier, he seemingly revealed for the first time that he owns Bitcoin:

“[we had ] Paul Tudor Jones on yesterday, and he was talking about, you know, QE infinity [and]… maybe the time will come when you need to have some type of asset that there’s a fixed amount of and he was referring to Bitcoin.

“I think maybe even Paul Tudor Jones…”

At this point, Palihapitiya, who is a big advocate for Bitcoin, interjected: 

“Say the words! Say the words”

Kernen then continued:

“I have to disclose that I I own… I mean, compared to you, I own like three cents out of a dollar or something… you know what I mean… but I have to disclose that I own it… but Paul Tudor Jones made the case yesterday, and you know yesterday was the halvening… so, the stock-to-flow has now gone up.”

Kernen’s disclosure delighted Anthony Pompliano (aka “Pomp”), a Co-Founder and Partner at crypto-focused investment firm Morgan Creek Digital Assets, who took this as a sign of the growing interest in Bitcoin:

Later in the interview, Palihapitiya went on to talk about Bitcoin:

“… when you have people like Paul Tudor Jones, sophisticated market participants who don’t necessarily come to it from that perspective,… now all of a sudden even he is looking at Bitcoin and the reason is because we are in this massive deflationary spiral and you have to figure out how to protect yourself.

“And so, however you think about it, from a classic economic theory or the schmuck insurance where you’re somewhat skeptical of the established governing masses, it is important that we have a hedge — a non-correlated hedge — and I still struggle to find anything that is as uncorrelated to anything else and to everything else than bitcoin.

“And I think that, you know, if we see it have its day, it’s a moment where you’re going to wish that you had just bought the 1% and just kept it.”

Last summer is probably when Kernen started to become bullish on Bitcoin. 

On 20 June 2019, he confessed that he had become “a Bitcoin bull”:

 Then, on 29 July 2019, Kernen surprised his guest — Fairlead Strategies Managing Partner Katie Stockton — by asking her if she believed that the Bitcoin price could reach $55,000 by May 2020 (i.e. the time of the third halving):

And on 23 August 2019, Kernen explained to his fellow co-anchors why he did not like Facebook-led stablecoin project Libra “one bit”:

 

Featured Image by “SnapLaunch” via Pixabay.com