In 2016, Kevin Durant accidentally lost access to his Bitcoin, remained locked out for 9 years and earned

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

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.