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- In 2016, Kevin Durant accidentally lost access to his Bitcoin, remained locked out for 9 years and earned a whopping 11,000% return without selling
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In 2016, Kevin Durant accidentally lost access to his Bitcoin, remained locked out for 9 years and earned a whopping 11,000% return without selling
Houston Rockets forward Kevin Durant smiles during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Atlanta Hawks in Houston, Friday, March 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
Kevin Durant has made plenty of smart investment calls over the years, but one of his strangest may have been the one he never really got to manage. In 2016, a dinner conversation persuaded Durant and Rich Kleiman to buy Bitcoin, just as the cryptocurrency was beginning to attract serious attention. Then they lost access to the Coinbase account holding it. For nearly a decade, the investment simply sat there while Bitcoin went through one of the wildest rises in financial history.
The dinner that started it all
The story goes back to 2016, shortly after Durant joined the Golden State Warriors. He found himself at a birthday dinner hosted by venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, attended by Durant and several members of the Warriors, where Bitcoin was a recurring subject throughout the night.Kleiman, Durant’s longtime business partner and agent, remembered the conversation vividly.“I just heard the word ‘bitcoin’ 25 times this evening, and the next day, we started investing in bitcoin,” Kleiman said at CNBC’s Game Plan conference in September 2025.They bought Bitcoin through Coinbase, at a time when the cryptocurrency was still trading in the hundreds of dollars. CoinGecko data cited by CNBC puts Bitcoin at roughly $400 to $1,000 during 2016, with the price around $600 when Durant first made his purchases.The exact amount Durant and Kleiman invested has never been disclosed.At the time, there was little reason for the purchase to attract much attention. Durant had just signed with Golden State a reported $54.3 million contract,, was preparing for a new chapter in his NBA career and was beginning to build the business interests that would eventually become a significant part of his life away from basketball.Then came the password problem.
Nine years locked out
Somewhere along the way, Durant and Kleiman lost track of the information needed to access the Coinbase account.It sounds almost too mundane for an investment that would eventually become worth a great deal more, but the problem persisted. Years passed without them being able to log in, check the balance or sell any of the Bitcoin. Being locked out meant Durant physically couldn’t panic-sell during any of Bitcoin’s dips over those nine years. The lost password did what few investors manage to do deliberately: it forced him to hold through the entire cycleAnd Bitcoin kept climbing.By September 2025, Kleiman was comfortable enough to turn the whole thing into a joke when he appeared alongside Durant at CNBC’s Game Plan event in Los Angeles.“We’ve yet to be able to track down his Coinbase account info, so we’ve never sold anything, and this bitcoin is just through the roof,” Kleiman said.“It’s just a process we haven’t been able to figure out, but Bitcoin keeps going up … so, I mean, it’s only benefited us.”Durant said he had been trying to find the password for “a few years”, adding that it was “in the cloud.”The irony was particularly good because Durant and Kleiman were already closely connected to Coinbase. Their company, Thirty Five Ventures, had invested in Coinbase and later formed a commercial partnership with the exchange. In 2021, 35V and Coinbase announced a multi-year deal involving digital-asset content for Durant’s media platform, Boardroom.Kleiman described the missing credentials as “a user error on our end”, while Coinbase said its customers could reset passwords through its self-service tools and that its support team was available around the clock.Behind the jokes, though, the account was finally being worked on.Also read: How Kevin Durant’s $250K AI bet turned into a potential $60M payday after a $12.9B sale
Coinbase eventually got Durant back in
The story had been public for barely a day before the missing account was no longer quite so missing.Coinbase’s support team worked directly with Durant’s camp, and access was restored in September 2025, roughly nine years after the original investment. Kleiman later said the recovery process was the reason he had been comfortable joking about the situation publicly in the first place.By then, Bitcoin was trading around $115,000-$117,000, compared with roughly $600 when Durant first bought it. The difference was enough to send financial outlets reaching for their calculators.The figure that circulated most widely was around $1.8 million, based on a hypothetical $10,000 investment in 2016 and roughly 15.38 Bitcoin held until the 2025 price. But that $10,000 baseline was only a guess, and potentially a conservative one. Durant had just signed a reported $54.3 million contract with the Warriors that same year, while the kind of investment gatherings hosted by Horowitz typically involved checks larger than $10,000. If Durant had invested closer to $100,000, a relatively modest sum by early-stage technology investment standards, the same calculation would put the potential value closer to $18 million.It was never a confirmed valuation of Durant’s account, however, because neither he nor Kleiman disclosed how much they actually invested or how much Bitcoin they bought.Bitcoin then climbed even higher, reaching a record $126,198.07 on October 6, 2025, only weeks after Durant regained access.
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The forgotten Bitcoin fits into Durant’s bigger business life
The episode is unusual, but the investment itself was not completely out of character for Durant.Away from the NBA, Durant and Kleiman have built Thirty Five Ventures into an investment and media operation with interests across technology, finance, consumer businesses and sport. Their portfolio has included Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Dapper Labs, Kalshi, Spindrift and Whoop, along with stakes in the Philadelphia Union and Paris Saint-Germain.
Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James, right, passes the ball while under pressure from Houston Rockets forward Kevin Durant during the first half in Game 2 of a first-round NBA playoffs basketball series Tuesday, April 21, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Durant has also had plenty of money to put behind those ventures. His NBA career has earned him $501.1 million in salary, according to Bleacher Report, with his biggest single-season payday coming last season at $53.3 million, according to SpotracBut the Bitcoin investment came much earlier, when Durant and Kleiman were still experimenting with new opportunities away from basketball. What followed was an unusual stroke of luck: being unable to access the investment meant they never had the chance to panic-sell during Bitcoin’s dramatic crashes or cash out during its biggest surges. What could have been a frustrating situation ultimately worked in their favour, allowing the investment to sit untouched for years and generate a remarkable return of more than 11,000%.
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Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com