Manuel Adorni, one of President Javier Milei’s most trusted aides, claimed last week that an all-in bet on Bitcoin over a decade ago has funded a luxurious lifestyle that is now under scrutiny.
Argentina’s well-established crypto community is struggling to buy Adorni’s explanation to rebut allegations of illicit enrichment. A scandal that erupted on a trip to New York this year is now costing Milei, who earned his standing with voters as a leader who vowed to weed out government corruption yet is now defending his administration against its fourth major graft case.
Adorni, now Milei’s Cabinet chief, says he invested about US$200,000 in Bitcoin sometime between 2013 and 2018 and made roughly US$300,000 in profit. In other words, the 46-year-old says he put what was essentially his entire net worth at the time into one of the world’s most experimental assets and walked away with about US$500,000 – a 150-percent return.
The story of Adorni’s crypto trading came as a surprise to leaders in the local crypto industry, in part because they think someone in their tight-knit community would have noticed his activity given the scale of risk he claims to have taken.
“I don’t know him as a Bitcoiner and I never saw him at a crypto event,” Ricardo Mihura, who has led NGO Bitcoin Argentina since 2016, said by text message.
“No-one knew him as a Bitcoiner – not even remotely,” said Nicole Connor, leader of Argentina’s Women in Crypto organisation, who described Adorni’s claims as “inconsistent.”
It is true that Argentines have embraced crypto for years, so Adorni would hardly have been alone in the investing strategy. The South American country is among the world’s top 10 countries for cryptocurrency adoption, driven by inflation, capital controls and deep mistrust of the peso.
A spokesman for Adorni didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Milei has stood by Adorni for months despite criticism within his own party and broader calls for his resignation that’s raised questions about why he’s sticking with him. Corruption is Argentines’ top concern and Milei’s approval ratings remain near the lowest level of his Presidency, according to LatAm Pulse, a survey by AtlasIntel conducted for Bloomberg News.
Like Milei, Adorni is an outsider with no prior experience in politics nor professional investing. He started as Milei’s spokesman in 2023, publicly railing against corruption in Argentina’s political class, before being promoted to Cabinet chief last year in a move that irked Milei’s ally-turned-rival, former leader Mauricio Macri.
Adorni first got into hot water in March when his wife, who doesn’t work in government, flew on the presidential plane for Milei’s “Argentina Week” in New York. Days later, video leaked of Adorni taking a beach vacation weeks earlier on a private jet with his family. Since then, he’s struggled to clearly explain how he paid for his travels as well as a mortgage for his apartment and a weekend home outside Buenos Aires.
To many Argentines, his crypto rationale is rife with contradictions. For months, Adorni said he didn’t commit a crime, only to concede in a TV interview that he had been buying dollars in Argentina’s black market – technically illegal activity practiced by millions of Argentines who are seldom prosecuted. More recently, video footage resurfaced from 2020 where he said he didn’t understand crypto well and “wasn’t very involved” in it.
His posturing as a low-profile, all-in crypto experimenter echoes Milei, who also claimed he wasn’t well versed in the industry when he was trying to backpedal from his own crypto debacle in 2025.
Around the time Adorni says he invested, Argentines were organising Bitcoin meetups and conferences well before the industry had banks, institutional funds or mass-market apps. In Buenos Aires, many of those early gatherings drew 30 or 50 people. Those obsessed with Bitcoin tended to debate, evangelise and tweet, organizers say. They don’t recall seeing Adorni.
The case also stands out because Argentina’s crypto market was small with limited liquidity back then, lacking the types of on-ramps that exist today. Industry veterans say a US$200,000 purchase by an individual in the country would have been logistically difficult at the time.
Argentines who work in crypto also point out that Adorni enunciates the word Bitcoin in Spanish differently than most in Buenos Aires.
“He doesn’t seem to be someone who understands crypto. He pronounces Bitcoin strangely – and he put his life savings into it? It makes a lot of noise to me,” said Sebastián Serrano, founder of Ripio, one of Latin America’s earliest crypto companies. “You don’t bet your life savings on something you don’t understand.”
Given Adorni’s avid use of X and Instagram, many in the industry find it hard to believe he could have gone through Argentina’s early Bitcoin period without taking part in the ecosystem’s social life. An investment of that size was not impossible, but it would have been highly unusual for someone without significant financial backing, according to Argentine crypto investor Santiago Siri.
“Nobody was putting all their savings into an all-in Bitcoin bet,” Siri said during a live podcast on news outlet Infobae. “It looks like the whole thing is a joke.”
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by Ignacio Olivera Doll, Bloomberg
