Two of the wildest bubbles of recent years have been Spacs and crypto. If you want to gaze awestruck at what happens when they both collide, take a look at the chart below.

Bitcoin miner Core Scientific last year went public through a BlackRock-backed special purpose acquisition company at a $4.3bn valuation. The company is now basically a pink-sheet stock, with a market cap of $55mn, or less than one Beeple.

It has managed the remarkable feat of making Chamath Palihapitiya’s Spac empire look good. Not exactly the career capstone that CEO Mike Levitt — a former CEO of Kayne Anderson and vice chair and partner at Apollo — would have liked.

But if you assumed the crypto winter might have stunted the lifestyle of bitcoin barons, think again! Core Scientific spent $1.8mn on private jets for Levitt and his colleagues in the first nine months of 2022 — treble what it spent in 2021, before it went public.

The company didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to its media email address. We’ll update as soon as we get a response.

The biggest problems bitcoin miners like Core Scientific and Riot Blockchain face are obvious: input costs (energy) have jumped and output prices (bitcoin) have puked. But Core Scientific looks like an exceptionally weak member of a sickly herd, which makes its love for private jets seem a bit weird.

Last month it warned that it could go bankrupt by the end of the year…