Michael Novogratz

Michael Novogratz is the former Goldman Sachs partner and Fortress hedge-fund manager who became one of crypto's most-recognized institutional voices, founded a publicly-listed digital-asset financial-services firm, and survived a multi-cycle run that took his net worth from a hedge-fund-driven peak through a high-profile leverage-driven drawdown and back through institutional adoption. He is the canonical example of a traditional-finance professional who saw crypto early, took it seriously, and built a public business around it well before doing so was comfortable in his original peer group.

Origins

Novogratz was born in Virginia, served in the US Army as a helicopter pilot, and graduated from Princeton. He joined Goldman Sachs as a fixed-income trader, became a partner, and moved to Fortress Investment Group in 2002, where he ran the company's macro hedge fund through both the global financial crisis and the post-crisis recovery. He left Fortress in 2015 and spent a year or two on personal investing, including increasingly large allocations to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Galaxy Digital

In 2018, Novogratz founded Galaxy Digital, a diversified crypto financial-services firm spanning trading, asset management, principal investments, mining, and investment banking. The firm went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange the same year and has subsequently expanded its US listing. Galaxy's businesses include some of the most-active institutional trading desks in crypto, an asset-management arm running publicly-traded crypto vehicles, and one of the larger publicly-listed mining operations.

The Luna position

In 2022, Novogratz publicly discussed Galaxy's involvement with the Terra ecosystem in unusually candid terms, including a tattoo he had had made depicting a wolf and a moon to commemorate his bullishness on Luna. When Terra collapsed in May of that year, the position became one of the higher-profile losses in the cycle, and Novogratz's willingness to discuss it on the record made him both an object of mockery and, more durably, an example of a senior figure willing to take public accountability for an investment thesis that did not work. Galaxy survived the cycle, restructured certain positions, and emerged into the subsequent bull market.

Where he stands in 2026

In 2026, Novogratz remains Galaxy's CEO. The firm has expanded its institutional businesses significantly through the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF cycles, is one of the larger underwriters of crypto-adjacent capital-markets activity, and is benefiting from the broader normalization of digital assets across traditional financial infrastructure. Novogratz himself remains one of the most-quoted institutional voices on the asset class, appearing regularly on CNBC and Bloomberg and at major industry events. The unresolved questions around him are about Galaxy's eventual scale relative to traditional asset managers entering the space and about the firm's geographic expansion strategy. His standing as the senior traditional-finance figure who bet his second career on crypto, took the losses publicly, and stayed in the game is by 2026 unchallenged.