The big names in bitcoin get a lot of airtime: Former hedge-fund manager Mike Novogratz, antivirus millionaire John McAfee and the Winklevoss twins are the public faces of the cryptocurrency bubble.

Their bitcoin profits pale into insignificance compared with the riches bestowed on Michael Poutre, at least on paper. This week, the skyrocketing price of his unknown company made him a paper billionaire richer than any of them, and at Monday’s high of $3.9 billion, worth more than 1980s junk bond king Michael Milken or movie mogul Steven Spielberg, according to the Forbes 400 ranking.

Mr. Poutre holds one of the few stocks to do better than bitcoin this year, a company attempting to make money out of cryptocurrencies. His ownership of a fifth of Crypto Co. , where he is CEO, briefly made him one of the richest people in America this week as its market value leapt to $12.6 billion, equal to the 381st biggest member of the S&P 500.

For a company that only started trading on the over-the-counter Pink Sheets market by a reverse takeover of a sports-bra designer this summer, and languished at 1 cent a share with no trading at all until September, there aren’t enough superlatives to express how bizarre this is.

It is yet another sign of the extraordinary popular delusion being created by bitcoin and the rush for everything crypto. Those who missed out on the 17-fold rise in bitcoin this year are piling into anything they can find that is associated with the cryptocurrency boom, even when the price can never possibly be justified by future profits. Just like the dot-com bubble, buyers don’t care because they aim to sell to a bigger fool.