Crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz shrugged off the bitcoin slump, defended Elon Musk, and made 3 bold predictions this week

• Mike Novogratz dismissed the drop in crypto prices as short-term volatility.
• The Galaxy Digital CEO took Elon Musk's bitcoin retreat at face value.
• Novogratz predicted a greener crypto industry, an ETF launch, and clearer regulations.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

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Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz shrugged off the crypto slump, defended Elon Musk, and made a slew of predictions on an earnings call this week.

"It's easy to get buried in the volatility of the day," Novogratz said, according to a transcript on Sentieo, a financial-research site. "Elon Musk's Twitter comments, bitcoin going down 4,000 points, and everyone starts running around like chickens with their head cut off."

The billionaire investor said he was taking Musk at his word - that he stopped Tesla accepting bitcoin due to its environmental costs, even though the clean-energy company purchased $1.5 billion worth of the coin earlier this year.

"There's too much conspiracy-theory stuff going on in the market right now," Novogratz said, likely referring to claims that Musk purposely manipulated the price of bitcoin with his tweets.

Novogratz also dismissed the ongoing crypto sell-off as near-term volatility, not a permanent decline.

"When you get so much capital flowing into the space, people get too long and then they get scared of something," he said, adding that it will take years before crypto prices cease to be volatile.

The Galaxy Digital chief made several predictions on the call. He expects Musk's bitcoin critique to lead the crypto community to embrace clean energy, anticipates a crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) will be approved in the US within the next year, and expects regulators to clarify the rules around owning and trading crypto in the next six months.

Novogratz suggested those trends could spur more retail and institutional investors to add crypto to their portfolios. He also touted bitcoin as a substitute for gold, the traditional haven asset for investors.

"Gold is the only element on the periodic table that really just gets valued because there's a social construct that says it's valued," he said. "Bitcoin has that space in this universe."

Moreover, Novogratz described Ethereum as a "web 3.0 bet," citing the numerous applications it enables. Those include decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), stable coins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

Overall, Novogratz expects the total value of crypto assets will triple, or quadruple, to between $6 trillion and $8 trillion in the coming years.