We are live from Consensus in Miami, and the theme this year is convergence.
Well, Kevin O'Leary has spent decades telling entrepreneurs exactly what their dreams are worth on Shark Tank.
But today, Mr.
Wonderful is playing a much bigger game.
So Kevin, thank you so much for joining me here at Consensus 2026.
This is a crypto conference, but tell me about what alternative assets you're into right now.
I'm having some fun right now.
People know me as a watch collector guy, but recently in the last year, just months, I've been getting into collectible sports cards because the rarest pieces are selling for tens of millions of dollars.
They're appreciating better than the market, better than crypto, better than anything.
I mean, the example I use is last August.
I formed a syndicate of three investors and we bought a. a Kobe Jordan dual auto man for 12.93 million and just got offered about 21 million for it, just under 21 million about two weeks ago.
So appreciation wise, that's pretty good.
So we decided to go a little deeper into it.
We've amassed over a hundred million dollars worth of cards.
I'm wearing one of them right now on my neck skybox Jordan.
This is a grail piece nine ever made.
This is two of nine trading.
When you can find one for around $5 million.
It's a vertical card.
It's in our one-of-a-kind Tiffany case.
Two and a half pounds of white gold and 110 carats of diamonds, but who's counting?
And I'm marrying it to a beautiful Rolex, also a ruby and diamonds, which I thought was great.
It's gorgeous.
We wore these, by the way, on the red carpet of the Oscars.
And then again, with the theme of Watches and Wonders is Independence, F.P.
Journe, a Resonance with one-of-a-kind, two dials on it.
I mean, I look fabulous.
What can I say?
Yeah, so Kevin, you walk the red carpet at the Oscars, and I know you were also wearing that Dolce & Gabbana suit as well.
But we're here at Consensus, and I love your outfit.
So I do have to ask you, when it comes to ALT, how liquid are sports collectibles here?
So my concern is exactly yours.
I said, show me and prove me liquidity.
I had one of our analysts go back 14 years and look at trades, and it looked exactly like a contemporary and modern art market.
It was the same appreciations of sort of 11 to 14 percent annually and a lot of liquidity.
If I wanted to sell this card, I could be liquid by this afternoon.
The demand for this piece, because it's a Grail two of nine, is worldwide.
The Asian market is where some of the biggest trades are occurring, because think about it, unlike a huge painting, this is very portable.
You don't have to put it in this case, but you know, this is a $5 million asset that's very portable.
I'm not saying why that's good or bad, but it's become very coveted, but only for the piece uniques.
Yeah, and you have heavy security with you right now.
Yes, I have an army behind me and a Brinks truck outside and you know, all the rest of it.
But talking about alternative assets here, we're here at a crypto conference, and right now we are looking at the price of Bitcoin back above that $82,000 level.
But we have been seeing a lot of volatility, especially since last year, October 2025, and the all-time highs we saw last November.
Where do we go from here?
So let me walk you through the last 10 months, okay, in terms of what's happened with all crypto.
From my point of view, because I work in the sovereign wealth market indexing that's indexing means that's how you create an ETF you create an index, so they want diversification of asset class last October at the beginning the first week of October, there was a big rumor out there that the.
Congress would pass the Structure Act, which would finally light up the way for institutional indexing of Bitcoin, and plus other crypto assets.
And most of them, there's 10,000 tokens and coins, were doing quite well.
And then, of course, that didn't happen.
So by the end of October, there was a massive correction, a massive correction.
And the altcoins, other than Bitcoin and Ethereum, really, really, really got hurt and they've never recovered.
People ask me, why is that?
Because during that period of October, when indexers started to do the analysis of what names they should own in all of crypto, there was only two they needed to own, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
They got exposure to the blockchain and they got the speculative asset class of Bitcoin.
That was 95% to 97% of all of the volatility.
I don't know how this is going to resolve itself because when they finally pass the Infrastructure Act, As I call them, the poopoo coins are not coming back.
Yeah, well, speaking of which, Kevin, yesterday I was walking around this convention hall and I saw a Shiba Inu dog.
So we all know that that dog represents Shiba Inu or even Doge, right?
So I know you represent, you always say poopoo coin.
So how should investors out there be looking at the crypto market, especially when we're talking about consensus?
We have some big names in the banking sector here and they're talking about convergence.
All that stuff is fun.
It's no different than going to gamble in Vegas the weekend.
Maybe you take a few thousand dollars, you're willing to spend it for entertainment, but it's all poo-poo.
But if you really care about where institutional capital is going to go, and that's all I care about, because even Bitcoin today is still a fringe asset.
It hasn't been adopted widely institutionally yet, but it will be once the Infrastructure Act passes.
And so, for me, owning Bitcoin and owning some Ethereum, which I do, which is part of my whole crypto portfolio.
I'm just waiting like everybody else, but all the rest, the dogs, the cats, the authoriums, I love all that stuff.
It's fun, but it's worthless.
So, I mean, you gotta call it what it is.
The one green field that hasn't been tapped yet, which I'm fascinated about, and I'm definitely gonna talk about it at the conference later today, there isn't a single index or token I can buy that exposes me to Wall Street on blockchain.
We've been talking about it for 14 years and nobody's claimed that space.
And if you're an institution, you don't wanna own 60 names to figure it out.
Who's going to emerge to service the S&P 500 on chain?
So the reason those tokens have been clobbered so much is AI has really damaged B2B or enterprise software.
And most people look at a platform, a blockchain platform now as software.
There's nothing that speculative about it anymore.
So that's also been hurt.
But someone's going to emerge that can say this S&P company uses my blockchain, this S&P company uses my blockchain. that would be valuable, whether they offer it in an ETF form or they put it out in owning the token itself, you know, in a wallet, whatever it is, that's what I seek.
I've got to go find it.
I want to be there early.
I haven't found it yet.
Yeah, and it's really interesting times that we're living through because you mentioned artificial intelligence.
We're all paying attention to that from a technology as well as an investment thesis as well.
But we're also looking at the U.S. markets hitting all time record highs during a time of so much volatility.
I know you just wrapped up season 17 of Shark Tank.
So for the Americans that are watching and want to get that American dream, what would you say to them at this point in time?
So the reason the markets are hitting all time highs, even in times of incredible turbulence and high energy prices, I'd add is because.
AI has now hit all 11 sectors in one way or another and enhanced both margin and productivity.
So offsetting the vol and the concern of high energy input prices is the fact that you can now prove quarter after quarter after quarter.
There is margin expansion, there is productivity, and different companies are using it differently and some are more successful.
Financial services, it's extraordinary what's happened.
Look at the insurance industry.
Used to take two weeks to do a policy, now it's nine seconds.
That's all AI data scraping, and so they're looking to figure out what fraud rates are in each zip code and figuring that out.
This area is intriguing, but how do I invest in that?
I'm taking a different approach.
I'm going for power.
I want to own the picks and shovels of what AI is going to be, because I can't pick the winners.
Nobody can.
There's billions being invested in five different models, and there's a ton of money being invested in software there and applications on AI.
But what is ubiquitously needed?
It's power, and it's data centers, and it's permits.
That's why I made a pretty material investment in VidZero.
They've proven their model.
I made a big announcement yesterday.
They were agnostic to any one hyperscaler, and they've got an LOI with a big player that's, according to their release, going to pay out $150 million a year when it stabilizes, which sounds like early or back in the next year, which is great.
But where else?
Because now with all the war going on, people want domestic.
So I've invested in 40,000 acres in Utah, 10,000 acres in Alberta, very controversial because people don't like data centers, but they're misinformed.
The new technology is much cleaner.
So to me, that's the picks and shovels.
Yeah, and as you mentioned, there's always going to be controversy.
But when we're talking about what we're seeing in the U.S. markets, what does diversification actually look like for the average investor versus, say, the ultra high net worth person who might be able to carry something like this around?
Yeah, I mean, you're right.
I have been looking for decades now for alternative asset classes.
I'm overweight, obviously, now. uh real estate because i'm actually buying the land i'm putting the data centers on so that's quite an exercise it's in crypto right now and this is very sobering because it's only since last october even retail investors have figured out i only need to own ethan bitcoin which is kind of depressing for all the guys that work so hard to get the other stories out there they've been crushed and I estimate I was talking to another you know level one level two story a chain last week, you would need $200 million minimum budget. to start to market another ticker.
For example, you talk about the price of Bitcoin all the time.
You probably, yes, every day, all the time.
You occasionally mention Ethereum, maybe 20% of the time, and then you don't talk about anything else on a mark-to-market price basis.
Yet two years ago, you would be talking about all kinds of alternatives.
You don't care anymore because no one else cares.
And so that's a huge problem for the crypto industry.
And even though there's a lot of passion around some of these other chains, no one gives a poopoo.
Well, Kevin, it was great having you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I know you have to hit the stage soon, so hopefully you'll join us again.
I really enjoyed it.
I always do.
