Thomas Jong Lee, commonly known as Tom Lee, is a prominent stock market strategist, research director, and financial commentator in the United States.
He was born in Westland, Michigan, USA, as the third child in a Korean immigrant family, with his father being a psychiatrist and his mother transitioning from a housewife to a Subway franchise operator. Lee later entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and accounting.
According to a January 2021 report by (The Wall Street Journal), Lee often cooks to relax after a busy day, particularly enjoying attempting to recreate the Korean dishes his mother made. He is low-key, with a scholarly style, rarely rebutting critics, instead trying to respond with data.
In an interview, he once stated, 'I cannot rebut my critics. I do not know what will happen. The stock market does not care about my opinion, so all I can do is try to understand what the market is saying.'
Lee's Wall Street career began in the 1990s, working at Kidder Peabody and Salomon Smith Barney. He joined JPMorgan in 1999 and served as the chief equity strategist from 2007 until his departure in 2014. During his tenure, he gained media attention for his optimistic market views and was also embroiled in industry controversies for his insistence on critical research.
In 2002, Lee, as a telecom analyst at JPMorgan, published a research report on the wireless operator Nextel, questioning whether its customer churn rate and bad debt reserves were accurately reflecting reality. On the day the report was released, Nextel's stock price temporarily fell by 8%, after which company executives strongly retaliated, with the CFO and general counsel calling JPMorgan's research head and legal department, accusing Lee of using misleading assumptions and even suspecting that he had leaked parts of the report to specific investors before it was officially published. JPMorgan subsequently conducted a two-week internal investigation, reviewing his emails and call records, ultimately confirming that Lee had not engaged in any wrongdoing.
(The Wall Street Journal) reported the incident under the title 'Unhappy Firm Bites Back,' sparking widespread discussion about the independence of Wall Street analysts. This incident became a representative case of conflict in Lee's career and established his research style of being data-driven and not yielding to pressures from the market and investment banking clients.
In 2014, Lee co-founded the independent research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and served as the head of research, successfully transitioning from a traditional investment banking strategist to a leader of an independent research firm. He was one of the first Wall Street strategists to incorporate Bitcoin into the mainstream valuation framework.
In 2017, Lee published a report titled (A framework for valuing bitcoin as a substitute for gold), proposing for the first time that Bitcoin has the potential to partially replace gold as a store of value. This framework is built on three key parameters: the annual growth rate of the U.S. monetary base (approximately 6.5%), the multiple of alternative asset values like gold to the total money supply (approximately 400% in the model), and Bitcoin's potential market share in this alternative value system (the model baseline is 5%).
According to the valuation model, Bitcoin's theoretical value center in 2022 was $20,300, with sensitivity analysis showing a valuation range between $12,000 and $55,000. Lee noted in the report that as the total market capitalization of crypto assets surpassed $500 billion, central banks and institutional investors might consider incorporating it into their foreign exchange reserves and asset allocation.
In the same year, Lee also introduced his short-term valuation model in a Business Insider program, based on Metcalfe's Law (which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users), using the number of Bitcoin addresses as a proxy for users and regressing the results against the average daily transaction volume per user, concluding that this model could explain approximately 94% of Bitcoin's price changes since 2013.
Lee's research style emphasizes data-driven and historical analogies, particularly excelling in medium- to long-term trend forecasting. In March 2020, when the pandemic triggered a global market crash, Lee was one of the first strategists to predict a 'V-shaped recovery,' firmly advising investors to increase their positions during the dip. In May 2021, as Bitcoin retraced significantly from its peak of $60,000 to the $30,000 range, Lee appeared on CNBC's (TechCheck) program and reiterated his initial view from December 2020 that Bitcoin would break $100,000 by the end of the year.
He stated: "Bitcoin is inherently extremely volatile, but it is this volatility that presents opportunities for returns. Even now that Bitcoin has fallen out of favor, I still believe it can break $100,000 by the end of the year."
Moreover, as early as 2019, Lee had suggested in a CNBC program that ordinary investors allocate 1% to 2% of their assets to Bitcoin, to which the host responded in surprise, 'That sounds kind of crazy,' and this segment later went viral, becoming a representative moment of his firm stance on Bitcoin.
In December 2023, Lee proposed in Fundstrat's annual outlook that the S&P 500 would rise to 5,200 points in 2024, while the index was still around 4,600; this target was achieved ahead of schedule in mid-2024. He subsequently further stated in Bloomberg's (Odd Lots) podcast that, benefiting from corporate profit growth, valuation reassessment, and technological innovation, the S&P 500 is expected to reach 15,000 points by 2030, reiterating that Bitcoin's potential long-term valuation could reach a million dollars as wallet adoption continues to grow.
Throughout his career, Lee has also experienced key judgment errors. In the 1990s, he was optimistic about the rapid growth of the wireless communication industry as an analyst, but after the internet bubble burst, the related sector plummeted significantly. Before the 2008 financial crisis, he also underestimated the systemic risks in the real estate market, later admitting this was one of the biggest lessons he learned—that stock market trends are highly dependent on the confidence of the credit market.
In an interview, he stated: "Once the credit market loses confidence, no financial market can remain unaffected." These setbacks prompted him to pay more attention to cyclical indicators and the structure of capital flows, establishing his research style anchored in historical data.
Lee has been actively involved in mainstream financial programs such as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN, often serving as a guest commentator and market strategy analyst on CNBC's (Fast Money), (TechCheck), (Halftime Report), and (Closing Bell). He has gained attention from investors for his insistence on independent viewpoints and his repeated successful predictions of overall economic market trends. During the significant decline of the US stock market in 2022, Lee maintained a bullish stance and suggested mid-year that the market had hit bottom, a perspective that was later validated, earning him the title of the contrarian optimist in the 'Wall of Worry'.
Currently, Tom Lee also serves as an investment strategy advisor at NewEdge Wealth, continuing to share cutting-edge views at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets.
Strategic Layout: Leading BitMine, Advancing Ethereum's Treasury Model
In June 2025, Lee was appointed chairman of the board of BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSEAMERICAN: BMNR), beginning his involvement in the company's strategic transformation from traditional mining to an enterprise-level Ether ($ETH) reserve structure. BitMine is a digital asset infrastructure company based in Las Vegas, Nevada, initially focused on Bitcoin mining and utilizing immersion cooling technology to enhance energy efficiency and computing power stability, aiming to build a high-performance, low-cost blockchain computing platform.
In the month of his appointment, the company completed a PIPE private financing, issuing 55,555,556 shares of common stock and related securities at a price of $4.50 per share, raising $250 million, and subsequently submitted an S-3ASR automatic registration statement to initiate an ATM (at-the-market offering) program of up to $2 billion, with Cantor Fitzgerald and ThinkEquity acting as sales agents, and the funds will be used to build Ether treasury reserves.
As of mid-July, the company revealed its total Ether holding reached 300,657 coins, with a market value exceeding $1 billion, including approximately 60,000 in-the-money options backed by $200 million in cash. Lee stated that the company is progressing towards the goal of 'acquiring and staking 5% of the total Ether supply.'
Subsequently, Founders Fund revealed a 9.1% stake in BMNR, while ARK Invest also purchased 4,773,444 shares of BMNR stock through an over-the-counter agreement, with a transaction value of approximately $182 million, announcing that all would be converted into Ether reserves to support the company's strategy.
In late July, BMNR initiated options trading, further enhancing stock liquidity. The latest revelations indicate that BitMine's Ether holdings increased to 566,776 coins, with a market value exceeding $2 billion, nearly eight times the initial amount of PIPE, making it one of the publicly listed companies with the largest Ether holdings in the world.
Lee: Stablecoins are Driving Ethereum to Become the Institutional Choice
In a recent interview with Amit Kukreja and CoinDesk, Tom Lee expressed his strong optimism for the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly driven by trends in stablecoins and the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). He pointed out that the rise of stablecoins constitutes the 'ChatGPT moment' for the crypto industry, with the global stablecoin market cap exceeding $250 billion, of which more than 50% of issuance and about 30% of gas fees occur on the Ethereum network. As stablecoins gain support from the U.S. Treasury and Wall Street, Ethereum is gradually becoming the key infrastructure connecting crypto and traditional finance.
As the chairman of BitMine's board, Lee pointed out that compared to ETF or on-chain custody models, Ethereum treasury-type public companies have five structural advantages:
Can purchase Ether through equity issuance when the stock price exceeds net asset value, achieving reflexive elevation of per share net asset value (NAV);
Can combine instruments like convertible bonds and options sales to hedge volatility, reducing financing costs while achieving low-cost or even no-cost position building;
Has the ability to acquire other on-chain treasury-type companies, further amplifying NAV leverage;
Can expand into Ether staking, DeFi yields, on-chain infrastructure, etc., to build a sustainable cash flow source;
Once its Ether holdings occupy a core position in the on-chain ecosystem or become a key node in the stablecoin payment and settlement network, it will have a position similar to 'sovereign puts' and may become a strategic asset prioritized for acquisition by financial institutions.
Lee emphasized that as platforms like Robinhood launch stock tokenization services through Ethereum Layer 2, more and more institutions are beginning to embrace compliant, scalable blockchain platforms, and Ethereum is currently the only main chain that meets regulatory adaptability, ecosystem maturity, and scale effects.
In an interview with (CoinDesk), he summarized: 'Stablecoins have allowed the crypto industry to experience an explosion similar to ChatGPT. Wall Street is looking for a chain that can carry real assets and comply with regulations, and Ethereum is becoming that intersection.'
Fundstrat analysts have set a short-term technical target of $4,000 for Ether, believing its fair value by year-end could reach between $10,000 and $15,000. Lee remarked: "Allocating Ether at the current price level is an effective path for corporate finance to achieve tenfold potential."
This article is reprinted with permission from: (MarsBit)
Original title: (Behind BNB's New High: Is Binance Looking to Go Public via a Shell?)
Original author: Luke, Mars Finance
'Who is Tom Lee? From Wall Street Celeb to Ethereum Micro-Strategy, What is He Calculating?' This article was first published in 'Crypto City'
