Elon Musk good for Bitcoin even on down day: Binance.US CEO

By Sonali Basak

The leader of one of the largest crypto exchanges in the U.S. sees Elon Musk’s impact on the industry as a positive -- even on a bad day.

“Whether he’s pushing markets up or down, that’s probably good in the long term,” Binance.US Chief Executive Officer Brian Brooks said in a Bloomberg Quicktake interview. “If Elon Musk is this interested in crypto, crypto must be pretty important.”

Bitcoin took a dive Friday after Musk hinted at a potential split from the largest cryptocurrency. Its volatility has intensified in recent weeks in response to various social-media posts from the Tesla Inc. founder.

“I sure hope he’s not trading when the prices move after he tweets,” Brooks said. “But if he isn’t, it’s a country with free speech,” he said, adding that “short-term market panics are never a good reason for anybody to buy and sell.”

Brooks, most recently a top banking regulator who took over at Binance.US last month, said his firm is in talks for new deals to expand crypto buying in clients’ wealth-management accounts in the U.S. He said he’s been purchasing crypto assets himself, and suggested that people should have the majority of their holdings in Bitcoin as the “anchor tenant” of the industry.

Still, he said Ethereum’s utility is rising, and “I’m all in for the moment.”

Ethereum “is the current platform for building things,” he said. “It was the first one to market that created a real platform that people who were going to kill the banks could build their apps on, and now you see that at huge scale, so I have a lot of confidence that will be the case.”