Millionaire at 18 and bankrupt at 22: the finance 'influencer' who personifies the danger of investing in cryptocurrencies

His is one of those stories of insane rise and spectacular fall that are so exciting, especially in the United States.

A proud upstart who found a shortcut to becoming filthy rich while being beardless, who allowed himself the luxury of bragging about his formidable nose and giving lessons in business entrepreneurship 2.0, and whose fortune, amassed in a flash, vanished during the collapse of the price of cryptocurrencies that occurred last spring.

The novelty in this case is that Kiarash Hossainpour is not giving up.

It may be that, as Scott Fitzgerald said, American lives do not have second acts, that in the land of opportunity there is no redemption that is worth once the fall has occurred.

But Hossainpour is not an American, but a German of Iranian origin.

For him, not even the most severe defeat is irreversible.

He is culturally programmed to get up off the mat and keep fighting.

Hence the optimistic speech with which he has returned to the fore these days, after suffering losses of between 60 and 90% (the versions differ) of his digital investment portfolio.

Speaking to the German edition of

this 22-year-old shark cub, a trashy Wall Street wolf to his fiercest detractors, assured that he will continue to invest in bitcoins and that he firmly believes in the medium-term future of the cryptocurrencies.

"Accumulating losses," he says, "is part of the game."

It is a test of character.

He belongs to a generation and demographic more than accustomed to the capricious volatility of money.

He first had very little, almost nothing.

Afterwards he achieved a lot, in five years of precocious and frenetic activity, to lose almost everything in one fell swoop.

And now he keeps “something”.

Enough to learn from the experience, heal his wounds and keep investing, keep paddling.

Speculative Investing Quick Lessons

Hossainpour adds that the collapse of his digital assets worries him only "relatively" because he is not considering selling them.

He considers himself "a strategic investor", one of those who do not succumb to "sudden panic attacks" because they always have high beams on.

"I did not sell in moments of uncontrolled boom and I will not sell, of course, in full decline."

Among other things, because he believes that the storm is about to subside and changing course in full turbulence would be typical of novice captains.

And he considers himself rather a fearless pioneer.

Followers and those interested in the cryptocurrency market lining up to listen to Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, moments before giving a conference at the WizinkCenter in Madrid. KIKE PARA

Bitcoin is trading today at 22,542 euros per unit, far from the 67,205 it reached in November 2021. In reality, it remains the most stable of all the cryptocurrencies in which Hossainpour has invested, the one that has devalued the least.

The true lethal bite to his finances has been dealt to him by Luna, the cryptocurrency for which he was betting with messianic fervor just a few months ago on his YouTube channel and that last May, in the graphic expression of the journalist Antonio Fernández Serrano, “stopped orbitar” by losing 99% of its price.

What happened?

Hossainpour blames the disaster on the "incompetence" of the team that launched the currency.

He acknowledges, yes, that he did not see it coming.

For once, he atrophied the sense of smell that he boasts and that has allowed him to accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers on his financial advice channels on social networks.

Because the young German is, in addition to a seasoned investor, a guru, an

Or, in the expression of the American stock market adviser and radio host Clark Howard, "an irresponsible person who has incited thousands of unwary people to go bankrupt."

The forging of a kamikaze entrepreneur

Kiarash Hossainpour was born in Berlin in 1999, into an Iranian family (he prefers to say “Persian”) who took refuge in Germany to flee the rigors of the Islamic revolution.

His father, a computer scientist, gave him his first computer when he was 10 years old.

With the entrepreneurial instinct that characterizes him, little Kiarash began to use it to make sports bets, but his father, "an upright man, a bit of the old school", strictly forbade him: "If you want the computer to serve you get money, first learn to code”.

And that he did.

Largely self-taught, like many of the first generation of cryptocurrency tycoons, he was introduced to the

scene and launched his first YouTube channel at the age of 13.

He soon wanted to go beyond offering

tips for beating

levels .

He began to dedicate himself to designing custom web pages in WordPress, a job for which he charged "barely 30 dollars a page", and in 2014, on a day that, as he himself explained on his social networks, "I will never forget, because it changed my life”, he received his first payment in bitcoins.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kiarash Hossainpour (@kylehoss)

That sent his brain into orbit.

A new currency, one hundred percent virtual, to a certain extent clandestine and that could be minted at home to be exchanged with members of a community of technological entrepreneurs?

At the age of 16, at the end of 2015, she took the decisive step: investing the nearly 40,000 euros that she had earned with her other lines of business in bitcoins, her new fetish.

His parents asked him if it was legal, if it was "real" money or a simple scam, but they put aside their reluctance as soon as he managed to accumulate his first million euros and show them that he could spend it on objects in the real world.

“My father comes from a very wealthy family that was impoverished by the revolution,” the budding millionaire explained in an interview with the investor engagement page

, “And maybe that's why he doesn't give too much importance to money.

He always told me that the most important thing was that he be prudent, that he continue with my university studies and not completely lose sight of the fact that those millions were nothing more than numbers on a screen”.

Numbers, in any case, that Kiarash used as a hook to increase his fortune, selling himself here and there as an example of success.

Although his financial YouTube channel generally offered relatively sensible advice (“invest only what you have left over, nothing you need to live on or to meet the needs of your family”), the photos in which he appeared, with just 20 years, wearing Richard Mille or Audemars Piguet watches, behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce, a Porsche or a Lamborghini and smoking Cuban cigars told a very different story.

The one of an unprejudiced young man who was making use of his talent and his formidable intuition to rub his hands in the faces of adult investors.

An example to follow?

When it was in full swing, in that autumn of 2021 when both bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were touching the sky, the international press began to notice it.

David Thompson spoke of him in

magazine as a kind of post-adolescent King Midas, a man "touched by the wand of success in every field that appears" and also willing "to share his experience on social networks" .

A miniature figure on a stack of coins representing bitcoins. Ruvic Dice (REUTERS)

His financial advice channel, Kyle Hoss, was presented as "a virtual school for future millionaires."

Arianna Rodriguez of the

described him as one of the few young Europeans who had already achieved full financial independence at the age of 18 and the man behind "an influential network that shares knowledge, but not a trivial one, but the kind of knowledge that is difficult to obtain and that makes a difference”.

In Rodriguez's article it was also stated that Hossainpour was the son of a modest family of immigrants whom he brought out of misery with the fruit of his investments, a detail that does not fit entirely in the story that the interested party makes of his own life. .

But anything goes when it comes to telling a success story that can serve as a hook for future investors.

And that is what Hossainpour's idyllic biography was.

a hook

In the opinion of Ana Cristina Silva, a finance professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, stories like those of this Cinderella of computing are far from exemplary.

In fact, it seems to him a symptom "of how much the culture of quick enrichment has penetrated among the young generations."

For her, "any undertaking requires a certain economic culture and, above all, a solid financial base, encouraging young people to invest in a field as speculative and volatile as cryptocurrencies tempting them with some supposed example of success is very irresponsible " .

Silva adds that a high percentage of his students "spend their savings on buying bitcoins and crypto assets of all kinds, thinking they are going to get rich, and most lose every last dollar."

From the point of view of the academic, "there is nothing further from the true culture of entrepreneurship, which requires, to begin with, training, discipline and values".

Hossainpour would find these reflections on business ethics and basic financial culture completely strange.

For him, entrepreneurship is above all about taking risks and staying calm.

He has been playing everything for everything in an eternal heads or tails that he started when he was 14 years old, and until now it had almost always come up heads.

The great cross of last spring is but a passing cloud that will soon dissipate.

As he told

, "I have to admit I was wrong about Luna, I'm not infallible."

But he remains convinced that time will prove him right and that very soon he will have recovered every penny.

The lives of Persian and German investors may indeed have second acts.

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