Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal (via Bloomberg.com)
Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal (via Bloomberg.com)
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Bloomberg host hilariously tears into blockchain fans, gets blocked on Twitter by CEO

Joe Weisenthal ridicules investor Naval Ravikant and other blockchain enthusiasts in a tweetstorm

By  / February 19, 2018 /

Don’t expect AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant to appear on Bloomberg’s “What’d You Miss?” any time soon. That’s because the show’s co-host, Joe Weisenthal, took to Twitter to rip into Ravikant’s lofty pronouncements about blockchain technology.

Here’s how it went down:

It all began in Sunday morning from a tweet by from Shane Parish, the founder of something called Farnam Street. For those unfamiliar with it (we were on that list), the site’s “About” section says:

“We address such topics as mental models, decision making, learning, reading, and the art of living.”

According to Parish, he has “helped millions of people master the best of what other people have already figured out.” You know, the sort of fluffy stuff that finds its way into business school curriculums so that students aren’t just learning how to increase the earnings of a company by decimating its workforce. The stuff Wharton’s Adam Grant is all about (and does a better job of it), for instance.

Though Parish is based in Toronto, Farnam Street is the road where Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is headquartered and the blog, of course, often praises the Oracle of Omaha and his sidekick, Charlie Munger. There’s also a newsletter and seminars and podcasts.

One such guest on Parish’s podcasts has been Ravikant. Besides running AngelList—which is the go-to site for startups looking for partners, capital, and employees—he was an early investor in dozens of tech companies, including Twitter, Uber, and Postmates, as well as smaller ventures that went nowhere. Then again, a couple of homeruns can more than compensate for everything else. In the past couple of years, Ravikant has been investing in the blockchain space.

Ravikant is a fan of Parish’s, so much so that he even links to his Farnam Street page on his personal Twitter profile.

So when Parish tweeted:

Ravikant replied:

That caught the attention of Joe Weisenthal, the Bloomberg host and markets editor. During his six-year stint as Business Insider’s executive editor—where he turned it into an internet powerhouse—Weisenthal even created his own cryptocurrency, called Stalwartbucks, named after his blog and Twitter handle “The Stalwart”. He’s not a Johnny-come-lately to blockchain technology and has been obsessed with it for quite some time. (Disclosure: Like most New York-based finance writers, this author is a social friend of Weisenthal’s and has had to hear him rant about cryptocurrencies ad nauseam for years).

Anyway, Weisenthal lashed out:

He followed up with this:

Weisenthal then went on an epic and hilarious tweetstorm about how some people talk about blockchain that was retweeted and liked hundreds of times:

Others joined in the fun. Economist Jeremy Cook, for example:

Portfolio manager Conor Sen:

CNBC host Mike Santoli also chimed in:


(Another disclosure: the author used to produce Santoli’s morning segment for Yahoo Finance. This is further evidence for internet trolls and Bolshevik revolutionaries as to just how incestuous finance reporting is.)

Ultimately, Ravikant wasn’t having any more of this, as Weisenthal soon found out:


We reached out to Weisenthal to get further comment but since it’s 6:30 a.m. and he has the day off, he has yet to respond. If anything, he’s probably recovering from a night of overloading on dim sum.

You keep doing you, Joe.

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Lawrence Lewitinn, CFA was the founding editor in chief of Modern Consensus. Disclosure: Lewitinn owns no cryptocurrencies in his portfolio.