Eric Jackson is a contrarian tech investor and founder of EMJ Capital. Known for spotting disruptive growth opportunities early and championing retail investors, Jackson has earned a reputation for bold calls—like predicting Carvana's turnaround and driving rallies in stocks such as Opendoor.
Today, as Founder of EMJX (a next-generation digital asset treasury platform) and a leading voice for the retail investor community, Eric Jackson bridges traditional finance with emerging technologies like AI and crypto.
In this exclusive interview with The New Money, Eric Jackson shares his latest insights on markets, innovation, and the next big opportunities.
You’ve been very early on a lot of thematic shifts that have played out in the markets over the past few years across technology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other spaces. Looking ahead, what’s the trend you are most bullish on right now that you think is overlooked?
The most overlooked trend right now is the institutionalization of risk intelligence, not just AI or crypto in isolation.
We’re moving from a world where investors and treasuries simply hold assets to one where they must actively route risk across regimes — volatility, liquidity shocks, macro transitions, and technological disruption. AI is becoming less about prediction and more about governance, decision constraints, and adaptive systems that operate 24/7 across global markets.
This shift is underappreciated because it doesn’t fit neatly into a single sector. It sits at the intersection of AI, digital assets, treasury management, and institutional infrastructure — and I think it will define the next decade.
One of the core beliefs you have about investing is looking for potential 100x returns on stocks and betting on companies with the potential for huge asymmetric returns. What are some of the first things you look for in companies when you begin research on them to decide whether they have that potential and therefore are even worth exploring further in terms of due diligence?
The first filter is asymmetry, not valuation.
I’m looking for situations where:
- The market has over-discounted failure
- Survivability improves meaningfully with scale
- There is a clear path from narrative collapse to narrative repair
Then I look for:
- Structural inevitability — the problem must get solved regardless of who wins
- Founder or leadership obsession
- Balance sheet optionality
- A credible way the company can move from “assumed dead” to “strategically essential”
If those conditions aren’t present, it’s not worth deeper diligence no matter how cheap the stock looks.
Your investment into Carvana (NYSE: CVNA) near the all time lows of the stock is now up nearly 100x. Obviously every great return on a growth company is due to a lot of factors. But if you had to pick one thing that was so special about Carvana that contributed to its turnaround, what was it in your mind?
The most important factor was operating leverage embedded in a misunderstood platform, reinforced by genuine customer love and a powerful insider signal.
Carvana wasn’t just a retailer — it was a vertically integrated logistics, pricing, and data system built for scale. Even during the darkest moments of 2022, customers consistently rated the buying and selling experience as meaningfully better than traditional alternatives. That kind of product-market fit is hard to fake.
What further reinforced my conviction was substantial insider buying in 2022, when sentiment was at its worst. When insiders are buying aggressively while the market is assuming insolvency, it’s often a sign the public narrative has diverged sharply from internal reality.
Once liquidity stabilized and discipline returned, the same operating leverage that nearly broke the company became the engine of the turnaround.
A few months ago you got very publicly outspoken about Opendoor (NASDAQ: OPEN) as a possible massive turnaround company. Shares of Opendoor were under $1.00 at the time and you were quite critical of the leadership team’s lack of communication with shareholders amongst other things. Can you share what led you to having enough conviction in the company to start buying it when you obviously didn’t believe in or agree with the path the company was currently on?
I separated the asset from the execution.
Opendoor owned a uniquely valuable real-time pricing engine for the largest asset class in the world: residential real estate. That asset didn’t disappear just because leadership communication was weak.
My conviction came from recognizing that:
- The underlying platform was intact
- The market was pricing permanent failure
- The downside was limited relative to the upside if execution improved
Those are precisely the situations where asymmetric returns are born.
Since you started being bullish on Opendoor obviously things have tremendously shifted. There’s a new leadership team in place, Keith Rabois and Eric Wu have rejoined the company and the stock is trading much higher than when you first invested. Putting aside the share price, what has deepened your conviction the most in Opendoor since you first got long?
Leadership and strategic clarity.
The return of experienced operators, a renewed focus on discipline, and a clearer articulation of how the platform scales beyond pure iBuying have materially changed the company’s risk profile. Opendoor is now behaving more like a long-term infrastructure company than a cyclical trading operation.
That shift matters far more than near-term share price movement.
An interesting point of connection is two companies you have been very bullish on for a while are DeFi Technologies (NASDAQ: DEFT) and BTQ Technologies (NASDAQ: BTQ). You took a position in both companies when they were trading on the Cboe in Canada and didn’t have a Nasdaq listing yet. And what many people might not know is that both DeFi Technologies and BTQ Technologies were founded by Olivier Roussy Newton. What is it about him as a founder that you like so much?
BTQ stands out because it is focused on foundational cryptographic infrastructure, not near-term hype.
Quantum computing is a long-dated but existential risk to today’s encryption standards, and BTQ is one of the very few public companies working directly on post-quantum cryptography — not as a concept, but as applied, enterprise-ready systems. That puts it in a completely different category than most “quantum” investments, which tend to be hardware- or research-centric.
What makes BTQ unique is that it sits at the intersection of quantum threat modeling, cryptography, and real-world deployment. If quantum computing advances on anything close to current trajectories, secure systems will need to transition well before the threat is obvious to markets. BTQ is positioned to be part of that transition.
You have recently entered into a deal with SRx Health (NYSE: SRXH) to acquire a company you control EMJ Crypto Technologies. You are going to lead the public company following the acquisition being completed. Can you tell us what the focus of the new company is going to be?
The focus is building a Gen2 digital-asset treasury and risk-intelligence platform.
Rather than being a passive holder of crypto assets, the company is designed to actively manage risk across assets, regimes, and time horizons using AI-driven governance, hedging, and decision frameworks. Over time, this evolves into a broader treasury operating system for digital assets — similar in ambition to what Aladdin became for traditional finance.
The goal is durability across cycles, not speculation.
Tell us where you see crypto and digital assets are right now from an adoption perspective. Obviously last year Bitcoin was down slightly which was in stark contrast to gold and silver making new all time highs. What do you see specifically for Bitcoin and Ethereum in the near term?
Crypto is transitioning from a speculative asset class into financial infrastructure.
Bitcoin is increasingly being understood as outside-money collateral — not a tech stock, not digital gold, but a balance-sheet asset for a world of persistent monetary instability. Ethereum, meanwhile, is evolving into a settlement and computation layer for programmable finance.
Near term, I expect continued institutional normalization of Bitcoin and growing appreciation for Ethereum’s role in real-world settlement and tokenization. The pace may feel slower than past cycles, but it is far more durable.
