The Pomp Podcast - The First Time Michael Saylor Ever Talked About Bitcoin

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Michael Saylor is the CEO of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the first publicly traded company to convert a material portion of its balance sheet into bitcoin. In this conversation, we revisit the very first time Michael Saylor ever publicly talked about bitcoin — recorded in late 2020 when bitcoin was trading around $10,000. We discuss his background founding MicroStrategy at age 24, the macro conditions that led him to reject cash as a store of value, why he chose bitcoin over gold and real estate, how he acquired $425 million in bitcoin without moving the market, and why he believes bitcoin is on a path to rival or surpass gold's market cap.========================Consensus Miami is the largest crypto conference in the world — May 5-7, 2026 in Miami. 20,000 attendees. 72% director-level or above. The deals, partnerships, and investments that shape the next cycle get made here. Use code POMPLIANO for 25% off your pass → https://go.coindesk.com/c26pomp========================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.========================Bitget (https://bitget.com/promotion/futures-tradfi?channelCode=regd&vipCode=nkew) is the world's largest Universal Exchange (UEX) (https://bitget.com/promotion/futures-tradfi?channelCode=regd&vipCode=nkew), serving over 125 million users with access to over 2M+ crypto tokens, and TradFi markets such as 100+ tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, FX and precious metal like Gold. At launch, users can trade 79 instruments with USDT directly with the App. Users can also enjoy high liquidity and low slippage, while trading these assets with up to 500x leverage. For more information on Bitget TradFi, visit this article (https://bitget.com/support/articles/12560603846859). For more information, visit: Website (https://bitget.com/) | Twitter (https://x.com/bitget) | Telegram (https://t.me/BitgetENOfficial) | LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/company/bitget-global/) | Discord (https://discord.com/invite/bitget)For media inquiries, please contact: [e-mail]========================0:00 - Intro1:25 - Michael Saylor's background & founding MicroStrategy 29:40 - The 99% stock crash & lessons learned 31:07 - How COVID changed MicroStrategy's business 33:37 - The macro problem: cash melting & asset inflation 40:45 - How Saylor discovered bitcoin 45:23 - Why not real estate, equities, or gold? 49:10 - Bitcoin's network dominance & why it already won53:30 - Addressing the "someone can copy it" critique 59:28 - Convincing the board: homework assignments & deliberations 1:04:30 - How they acquired $425M in bitcoin without moving price 1:09:45 - Reaction from other CEOs & breaking the mental block 1:12:00 - The four-minute mile moment for corporate bitcoin 1:17:00 - Addressing bitcoin's volatility 1:21:39 - Bitcoin vs. gold market cap1:23:10 - Rapid fire questions & closing

It's not 10x better than gold. It's 100x. Maybe it's 1,000x better than gold. We could go on for hours. I could tell you why I think it's 1,000x better than gold. Hello, everyone. Today, we've got a very special treat. I went deep into the archives and I found a video that I did with Michael Saylor back in 2020. That video is the very first time that Michael Saylor publicly talked about Bitcoin anywhere on the internet. The context here is that Strategy, which was known as MicroStrategy back then, had just put about $500 million from their balance sheet into Bitcoin. It was the first public company to ever do that. And I spoke with Michael because I wanted to understand who's Michael Saylor? What is MicroStrategy? Why are

they doing this? What is his thesis on Bitcoin? And what is his plans for the future? It is fascinating to listen to him talk about this in late 2020, when Bitcoin is trading around $10,000 per coin, to now see what has become one of the largest holdings of Bitcoin in the world. Strategy and Michael Saylor own more than 800,000 Bitcoin. They've continued to relentlessly buy as much of the digital currency as they possibly can. And I think listening to this conversation will help you better understand what's happening there and why so many people over the last six years or so went from being skeptics to now being true believers. So here's my conversation from the second half of 2020 with Michael Saylor. It's the very first time he ever

talked about Bitcoin. And I hope that it's very valuable to you to understand where we've been so you can better understand where we're going. All right, guys, bang, bang. I have Mr. Michael Saylor here. You're an absolute legend, my friend. Thank you so much for doing this. Happy to be here. Let's start. You are Bitcoin famous now for being the CEO of the first publicly traded company to convert a material amount of your balance sheet into Bitcoin and use it as a reserve asset. We will get to all of that fun stuff in a minute. But let's just start with your background and kind of how you got to running MicroStrategy, what that business

does, and kind of that background that really led you to this. Okay. I grew up in an Air Force family, lived on military bases my entire life. I went to MIT on an Air Force scholarship. I got a degree in astronautical engineering, studied spaceship design. while I was there I got another degree in history of science I studied the structure of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts and became very fascinated with how new new technologies get introduced learned to fly in the air force but I never went active duty because just as I was

about to graduate the cold war ended the Reagan star wars build-up won it and one day my commanding officer walked into the room and said, you know, we paid for education. You're on the hook for five years active duty. But if you want to join the reserve, you can do that. And if you want to go active duty, then you're going to wait two years before you get called up. So, you know, the choice would get paid three times as much in the civilian world or, you know, and serve in the reserve or wait. So this was an easier choice for me because I was going to be a pilot. And in my final semester I was diagnosed mistakenly with a benign heart murmur and it disqualified me from flying combat jets. And so my hopes dashed to being a fighter pilot. I decided I did not want to wait

around. And so I joined the Air Force Reserve and I became a civilian unexpectedly in the final month of my undergraduate career. I thought I wanted to be a professor. I got into a PhD program, but I had no money. And so I decided I would go work for a year and then I would apply for a fellowship and then I would go back and get my PhD. I worked for the first six months. The company I worked for blew up, you know, and I ended up working at DuPont and I was building computer simulations for DuPont. And around the 18-month point, I tendered my resignation to go back to MIT. And I was building computer simulations to predict the return on billion-dollar capital investments in the petrochemical industry. And a computer model was going to be used to justify

a $1.5 billion investment. And the executive that wanted the money, I'm sure he said to his offers. Hey, tell the kid we need him to finish the job. And I was 24 and living in an apartment with milk crates for bookshelves, spending 700 bucks a month. And I knew I didn't want to stay and be a corporate bureaucrat. So I was like, no, I'm not staying. And the executive said, well, give him whatever he wants. And I said, well, you want to raise? I was like, no, I don't want to raise. He said, well, what do you want? I said, well, when I was in high school, I wanted to be a rock and roll star. And that was Dash. And when I was in college, I wanted to be a fighter pilot astronaut. And those hopes were dashed. And my third idea was be a professor.

And that's what I'm going to go do. And there's only one last thing on my checklist, which is I'd like to be a CEO of my own company. And I said, OK, so if you want me to stay, you're going to have to let me start my company. I think I got a quarter million dollars in cash, two and a half million dollars in contracts. They let me hire 10 people from DuPont, get me free off the space and computer equipment for the first two or three years. I took the, you know, they said, we can't give you the money up front. You're just a 24 year old. I said, you got to, because this is the only time this negotiating strategy ever works. I said, you got to give me the money because I have no money. Like I had, you know, they said, well, but, and they went back to their boss and I,

And they did this deal that you would never, ever, ever do. But I just happened to be the one guy on the East Coast that could make their computer program work. And the guy was 12 weeks from getting a billion dollar check from a mega corporation. And it was all irrelevant. So they gave me the money. I thought, holy crap, I have $250,000. This is enough capital to last me for seven years.

So I figure seven years. Good. Let's start. And so age 24, I started MicroStrategy with the thought that I didn't want to work for anybody else. And when it failed, I would go back to college. And it never failed in the first year. We did, you know, 10 people and then 20. And then we were 5 million.

Then we were 10 million. Then we were 20 million. Then we were 40 million. And at some point, we were 80 million. And then we kind of came to the market in the, you know, 96, 97 timeframe. And the dot-com revolution is going crazy. everybody's clamoring, you got to go public. So we came public in 1998. And then there was no going back, you know, I got on the roller coaster. And so that's how I started MicroStrategy. I

didn't mean to, I kind of fell off the turnip truck and hit my head on a pot of gold and I'll keep it. So when you decided to go public, this was like right in the heart or at the start really of like kind of this mania phase uh talk a little bit about um going through as a public company uh leader kind of the multiple market cycles right because if you went public in 98 you get 99 this big boom you have to get the crash you kind of then see you know another rise 0809 happens right then you kind of get this incredible uh decade in the equity markets um and then you get covid it's like how have you kind of navigated every single one of these because i don't think a lot of people realize, like, you start a company at 24 years old, you're still running that company

today, right? And so it's been a journey. You know, like, here's an irony. You know, I never got that PhD. I'm just like a silly MIT undergraduate. I remember I was competing in my early years with this guy, this professor from MIT, who had like umpteen degrees and was so much more educated. And, you know, I would be running a million dollar company, he's got a million dollar company. And he said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm building these computer simulations on a Macintosh. He said, you know, well, all the experts say the Macintosh is going to die. That's a bad idea. So, well, eventually, you know, eventually I ported it to Windows. And the next time I saw him, the company's $5 million. And we're working on Windows. And he goes, what are

you doing? I said, well, I'm building executive information systems on Windows machines using this thing called Wings, this new spreadsheet with a programming language. He said, oh, well, experts say that Wings will never work. Excel is going to dominate the spreadsheet market. And that's about it. He was still running the million-dollar consulting company giving advice. I said, OK. Well, it turns out he was right.

And in a year, we flipped the company. We rebuilt the product on Visual Basic. And we doubled again. And he said, what are you doing? I said, well, now we're doing this executive information decision support system. And he goes, well, that, you know, that won't work on Visual Basic. They're going to use C++. And he stayed 1 million and we were like 20 million.

And then the next thing you know, we started building decision support systems on relational databases. And everybody said, well, that'll never work. That's too slow, right? And it kind of worked until we got to 40 million. And then along came the web and we flipped it again and we put a web interface on it and that got us to 80 million. And every single two or three years, there's something new that was simultaneously an existential threat, like it's going to kill us, or an opportunity if we embrace it.

And we're always inventing the next thing. So eventually we found ourselves into the business intelligence business, and we created business intelligence, web intelligence, relational intelligence. And I had three big competitors or business objects, Cognos, you know, Crystal Reports. And we got to like 2007, 2008 and conventional wisdom wise. Well, they all had to sell out. So all three of them sold. One sold Oracle, one sold SAP, one sold IBM. And we're still standing. Right. And then we accrued some more some more customers and we kept motoring on. And then along came the iPhone, you know, and the iPhone, the first iPhone in 2007 was kind of a toy, had no cut and paste, no app store.

2009, the iPhone actually started looking pretty interesting. And and I just I became very enamored with with the mobile wave. This what happens when software leaps off of a PC out from under your desk? Because that's what they were. I mean, the computers were rocks under your desk and they were ugly and they had lots of cables coming out of them. I thought, what if the software is running in your hand and what if that phone's in your pocket? It's like software going from solid state block of ice. It gets the liquid, a laptop, and then it goes to vapor state and a vapor state was on the phone.

And I thought, well, man, all of a sudden, instead of going to the office to sit down at a desk and run your software, Maybe you have the software, your kid's soccer game on a Saturday afternoon, and then maybe rethink how the software works. So we started doing mobile stuff and we implemented mobile intelligence. And that took us to the next level. Now, along the way, I kind of I took one path, but I was always kind of a tech inventor at heart, entrepreneurial. so back in uh 96 when the internet hit you needed an email domain so we bought microstrategy.com but i was too lazy so i thought why am i going to type microstrategy.com why don't we buy strategy.com so we went we bought back when no one cared we bought strategy.com for like 50 grand and then i and then i thought why don't we just start buying words so we bought wisdom.com

and then we bought usher.com and by the way do you know who owns hope in the world no i own hope hope.com hope emma i bought speaker i bought alert i bought angel i bought alarm i bought voice i mean and and here's my thinking you know there are all these search engines and If you go online and you search for voice, you get like two billion hits on Google. OK, if you want to launch a company named voice and you own voice dot com, you go to the top of the list of the billion. And so my thinking was, if 10 billion, five billion people go to school and they learn how to spell alert or Emma, right, Emma, E-M-M-A. If they know how to spell that, isn't that good for a brand? and so i started thinking about branding and and uh i launched a business alarm.com we eventually

spun it off it's a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company on the nasdaq today uh and uh you know we made some money we didn't make the billions but we made a lot of money off it like 30 40 million and then we launched another company but an alarm was all about integrating your home alarm system with the internet yeah and then we launched another company called angel and angel was like an earlier version of siri it was an interactive voice response for many telephone like an angel on your shoulder talk to it and they respond we eventually sold that for about 100 120 million and so you know what i learned was it's easier to invent things and and it's easy you know you can invent something you can even get it to scale

um can you can you maintain it and can you commercialize it right a lot of people find like you can buy that boat can you afford to maintain that boat that's harder now you maintain that boat are you really going to enjoy that boat are you going to use that thing that's harder the analogy in business is just because you can buy it doesn't mean you can uh make make it uh competitive and even if it's competitive doesn't mean you can make profit from it so eventually i learn that you can't keep inventing stuff and we streamlined we sold those off but i got i got to 2020 or 2019 where i sold voice.com i tell you that story in a bit but i got to 2020 and we had a portfolio domain names are sitting there i appreciated digital scarcity i thought

these are unique in the universe only one person can own the work by the way you know who owns michael.com please tell me it's you yeah by the way and and you know who's lazy i thought well what if someone just wants to type in mike about that too i'm waiting for michael jordan to call me up like why wouldn't you own michael.com how much money do you think you spent on domains over the years acquiring all of these two million bucks million bucks okay so so let's call it low single digit seven figures right so a million two million three million whatever it is back in the back in the day back in the 90s and i just sat on them because i figured the english language is going to be around for a while okay and before you sold voice.com

how much do you think that you had made from selling the domains we made like uh 35 million in the alarm transaction and more than 100 million in angel transaction so so but we had we had uh commercialized businesses with them so we sold the domain and the and the business with them as part of it and uh voice was the first uh the first naked domain sale that we did that was material and we did that one for 30 million and we just sold the domain nothing else and when you go to do this uh when people hear wait a second the same guy who did this Bitcoin thing, sold a domain for $30 million. He also has a business that's worth over a billion dollars in the public markets, et cetera. He's spun off multiple

companies that are now worth tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. This guy just keeps hits after hit, after hit, after hit. How does something like voice.com come together? Do they approach you? Do you put it up on a broker site and say, hey, there's a $30 million domain? How does that work? You know, at some point I said to my marketing people, why don't you make a list of all of our premium domains? And my definition of a premium domain is is a domain where if you hit the Google search, you will get 500 million hits or a billion or five billion hits when you typed it in the search engine. And they're all just, you know, ideas like wisdom and hope. Yeah. And I said, why don't you make a list of them and send them out to every, you know, everybody we know and see if anybody's interested in them. And we sent out the letter and we heard back, you know, nothing. Right. Maybe I got like two venture capitalists called me, but nothing ever went anywhere. And I was like, OK, forget that. Go back running my own business.

And with voice, you know, this is how this goes down. I'm sitting at my desk one day and one of my junior 20 something business development reps walks and he goes, hey, some broker, you know, called us and they offered us like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you know, for this domain voice. And I looked at it, and I'm like, look, I've been waiting for 20 stinking years. Like, $150,000 isn't going to do much for me. I said, tell them no. Okay. So nothing goes on, and then they come back. They offered us $300,000 now. I said, well, tell them no.

Don't bother me. So I waited. And then the next day, they come back. They doubled it to $600,000. i said uh no still not interested um tell them tell them it's gonna have to be something north of you know 10 million bucks i'm just not interested they go well they they offered 1.2 and then it went to three and then it went to six and when it got to 10 or something like that finally that you know i'm starting i've got all these other people lobbying me salespeople sitting

like jackals you know like you're gonna want to you know they're all like you have to sell this you have to sell this and this is where we're selling selling intangible assets like anything artwork it all comes down to how much are they worth to you right and so if you needed the 10 million dollars you would have taken the 10 million dollars but at this point you know i have 500 million dollars of cash in the bank if i and by the way i i love my things you know like i i love them tears right maybe you can tell that i'm a little bit passionate about some of this stuck you know so i would rather own it and not have the 10 million then sell it you know for for that so i said don't know they said okay well they went up to 22 million i said i think when

they said 10 i said the numbers i'll sell it for 30 million so the only price i ever put on the table 30 million bucks i didn't like nothing else i was like after it got to 10 i'm like i will sell it for 30 million because that's enough to i thought by the way it's an i didn't sell for 30 million because i thought that's what it was worth i think that the word voice in the english language is worth 100 million like i've seen people drop 100 million dollars on an ad campaign and you want to drop 100 million in ad campaign with the with the i voice.net type domain it's like so i thought it was worth more but i thought well i gotta i need to market to market i need to like create some kind of market comp for it so we'll do 30 million so tell them

30 million they said they'll give you 22 i said uh no but tell them i'll talk to them and so around 22 million i agreed to get on the phone and you know so like i'm talking to a broker and a lawyer i'm like i you know all through this we're like well who's the buyer who's the buyer not some some somebody you know like and if they said if someone has said yeah we're a startup and we've got like 12 million dollars in the bank and we'll give you all of our cash and this is all we've got maybe they might have swayed me but but i just had a whale on the other end of the line that that wouldn't identify themselves and i thought okay well that's the case i'm just gonna wait until they hit my bid you know if you had if you had an acre in central park and someone wanted to

buy it from you and the price is the price you would wait and then when it's like you don't want I'll wait. I got another decade. I'm not going anywhere. Somebody's going to eventually want to commercialize voice. So eventually they got on the phone and I'm talking to a broker, but I hear like a click, click, and there's other people eavesdropping on the line. So I'm kind of just talking to myself. They said, well, we're authorized to go to 22 or 23 million. I said, you know, sorry. I said, go to the Google search engine and type in voice right now. And then why don't you what you'll notice is that it's more popular than like what's up with a billion users. It's a better brand than you would get. You know, if you were to get a billion people online, it's it's a better brand than than Oracle or than SAP or than hundred billion dollar plus companies.

so this is how i value it i'm i said like this is like my daughter i'll marry her off but only to a man that's going to treat her better than i will treat her so if you guys really value this then give me the 30 million otherwise i'm keeping it you know and and so at some point they come up to 30 million right you guys agree At that point, they agreed to $30 million. But did you know who it was before you agreed? No. I never knew who it was.

Really? I never knew who it was. Okay, so you agreed. I sold it in the blind, basically saying no, from $150,000 up to $30 million. And then finally, they did it. I still didn't know who it was until after the transaction closed. And then I hear it's some crypto company, and that's the end of it for me. And that's my introduction to crypto.

I literally am thinking about the broker who's like, okay, just showing up to work $150,000 trying to buy a domain. And next thing they know, a couple weeks later, they're brokering $30 million deals and probably, you know, they're peeing in their pants, right? Trying to just hoping to God this goes through because they've already thinking about what house they're going to buy based on the commission type situation, right? It was amusing. and so you do this you say that it's your first um kind of foray or experience with crypto but there's this experience with crypto all right so there's this tweet sold the domain there's this tweet that everyone is begging me to talk to you about which is in uh i think it's 2012 or 2013 you basically put out a tweet so you're early because it's 2012 2013 about bitcoin You're also on Twitter then, which is still pretty early for Twitter in general. And you basically tweet out, you know, kind of saying what I would consider a pretty down the fairway critique of Bitcoin, which is like it's not going anywhere.

Yeah. Right? Fast forward seven years. Online gambling, it's days or another. Yeah. So like seven, eight years, and now you've got a material part of your balance sheet in Bitcoin. What happens? How does that happen?

Okay, Anthony. Can I tell you the truth? Of course. All right. I got an iPhone back in the day, I installed Twitter on it. And it used to be really fun. And I used to really enjoy reading the news and tweeting stuff. Right? And it's like, it was like, you know, by the way, there are certain people on Twitter that still seem to enjoy just tweeting out whatever the heck they want. So I was in that stage, and I had a lot of opinions. And so I'm

tweeting stuff and eventually yeah and by the way i i tweeted a thousand things i forgot all the things i tweeted so eventually i realized that it's probably better for my my communication effectiveness if i limit my tweeting to stay on brand so like i have a company micro strategy if i have something intelligent to say about micro strategy i say it and i have a non-profit foundation the sailor academy that gives away free education to hundreds of thousands of people we're just giving away a free college degree and if i have something that i can do to help them i say it and then whenever anybody else does anything that i might have an opinion i keep my mouth shut now because i've realized it's just an opinion and i've lived long enough to be wrong on a lot

of things. But now, coming back to that specific tweet, I really am ashamed to say, I didn't know I tweeted it until the day that I tweeted that I bought $250 million worth of Bitcoin. And then I discovered the hive mind crypto Twitter consciousness, where all of a sudden, they all went through all my tweets. They found it. They reminded me of it. They compared it. And I'm like, oh my God, I literally forgot I ever said that. I took it as kind of like kind ribbing. I didn't get all worked up about it. I'm like, you're right. I was wrong. What an idiot I was. I wish I could go back and do it again. Today's episode is brought to you by Consensus Miami. I'm going to be speaking there on the main stage in a couple of weeks. This is the event the entire industry

shows up for wall street the white house all of crypto and web3 this may 5th through may 7th you can discover everything from crypto at scale to institutional integration and agentic commerce it's the forces driving trillions on chain and reshaping global finance 20 000 decision makers are going to be in attendance three action-packed days deals get signed here funds get raised here and the next cycle starts here as well you can't afford to miss it i'll be there speaking and you can use the code POMPLIANO to get 25% off your pass and join me there. Go in the description and look how to spell my name and use code POMPLIANO to get 25% off your pass to join me there. Well, the part to me that was so funny about all of this is one, you're right that

the internet never forgets, right? And it sounds like you were using Twitter early on how I use it, which is sometimes I literally tweet things and I tweet them for myself to remember what I'm thinking, right? Like I just, you know, throw something out there. The problem is that the internet doesn't forget. And even if that was a thought in the moment, right? You change your mind later. It's a stamp, you know, kind of that never goes away. And so when they found it and I saw that, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Like literally in a six, seven year time period, it's not just from a, I don't believe it has value to, oh, maybe it has some value, right? Would you consider the move of taking the $250 million, the first investment, is that a bet-the-company type move?

Or do you look at that as more conservative than a bet-the-company type decision? I would not say it's a bet-the-company decision. um what i would say is we looked at it and before i made that that uh decision before the before i was able to convince anybody on the board or the executive team to agree that was the right idea we all needed to collectively be of the opinion that we were going to be generating cash ad infinitum. So there's a journey that we went through corporately over the past year. And there's a journey that Bitcoin went through over the last seven years. So if we focus upon our journey, we had $500, $600 million in cash. And we were buying our stock back a bit. And then we

were thinking, maybe we'll need to buy another company. We need it for a rainy day. Or maybe something really bad will happen and we'll really need the money you know one of my heroes is steve jobs and steve jobs you know you know if you had a near bankruptcy experience and he did and i did too by the way by the way i i lived uh i lived to see my stock go from 333 dollars a share to 42 cents okay wait wait wait hold on back up yeah the stock price fell what time period is You know, it's not like I like to brag about this stuff, because it's not something you want to be proud of. But I will tell you that that two of my bragging rights are, I am the pretty much the longest lived public company CEO in my industry, because I've been public company CEO for 22 years. And the second thing is, I'm pretty sure I'm the only public company CEO that ever presided over a 99.8% drop in the stock price and kept his job. I mean, okay, so when does this happen?

That was 2003, you know? Okay. Look, it's another story. I learned a lot of lessons. We don't want to get off the subject of Bitcoin and the subject of whatever. The short lesson there is don't run out of money. Always have cash on the ballot sheet. And don't spend more money than you're taking in. And I feel like an idiot to give that advice to anybody. But it's still good advice right now. So let's fast forward back to 2020. So we had the money. We are we are very conservative, no debt, ready for a rainy day, ready to seize the opportunity, buying our stock back. covid hits the pandemic hits everybody's you know our equities in the tank you know uh we're losing

momentum and the first thing that happens in in q1 is it's all kind of shock and awe and in q2 the question is how does this impact my customers our business our product our value proposition and uh you know and by the way everybody gets impacted differently right if you're running a cruise line or a theater or whatever, and sometimes counterintuitively. And in our case, we sell enterprise software that helps you think better. We sell business intelligence. And we sell business intelligence to lots of governments, agencies. We sell it to massive banks. We sell it to, in essence, global 2,000 companies. Even the ones that get impacted, they're like the national airline they can't go out of business right they so that's our customer

base so we realized that our software kept working demand was still there everything is smooth and in fact the great thing about software is software you can ship even you know over the internet all of our services went remote so our value proposition is intact and the the surprise for us is our productivity went through the roof and our cost structure compressed. All of a sudden, you know, $20 million a year of flying around in airplanes went away and $10 million worth of trade shows and $20 million worth of marketing things went away, but the customer and demand didn't go away. So we actually found that we were much more efficient. So bottom line is, yeah, we got that black swan event, but that black swan event actually kicked us into a high gear productivity.

And so that was the, that was the positive on the, on the PNL side. We, we realized that we were going to generate more cash and we, and there, and there was no real, no real rational business plan where I take $200 million and I spend it to make the business better. I can burn it to make the bit, but I can't spend it to make the business better. Simultaneously, we got a gift from the Fed and the macroeconomic side. While we're trying to figure out what happens on the P&L, all of a sudden, what do we see? The long bond index goes up 22%. If you had asked me, Anthony, what's the investment that you do not want to make? I would never in a million years buy a 30-year bond that yielded 2% interest. Never, ever. And yet, that was a winner this year.

If you bought a 30-year bond at 2% interest, when the interest rates go to 1.2, you've actually got a massive spike so equity spiked big tech spiked bond spiked and you know and we looked at our cash and i had to listen to a litany of of talking heads ray dalio on down you know if ray dalio didn't say cash is trash every podcaster that trolled ray dalio said ray dalio says cash is trash cash is trash and you know and then i'm and then i went to school at some point on you this is probably this is after i realized i had a problem and i listened to you describe the plight of the working man i you know i go to work i get paid five okay this is not a workman this is a working lawyer i get paid five hundred thousand dollars a year i save fifty thousand dollars i

put it in my piggy bank. I have $500,000 in cash in the bank. I have kids and I have a future. And then all of a sudden, I realized that the cost of a college education is going up at 8% a year, and my cash is yielding zero. Now, at that point, we've got the pump podcast telling me, I'm crazy to work for dollars and save my cash. And if you take the $500,000 in the plight of the lawyer with the two kids when I sent him to Harvard and the $500,000 of cash in the bank yielding zero. And now you multiply everything by a thousand.

That's me. I have $500 million company. We're making $50 million a year. I got thousands of people working as hard as they can possibly work. We're sacrificing right and left. We're squiring our pennies away. We're putting it into the bank account.

there it is and uh you know in 2019 and before we worried about the unknowable and we thought maybe we'll use it for something and i i'm a bit older than you you know i remember when you got five percent interest overnight on your money and it wasn't that long ago that the risk-free interest rate was five percent before the great financial crisis and i'm like i'm gonna make 25 30 million dollars a year on this and i kept hoping and waiting for those good times to come back i was the guy that when the interest rates you know when the 30-year t-bill interest rates started to go three and a half percent like finally they're going to go to four and then they're going to five and they're going to go back to normal right normal interest rates

and then of course hope was dashed it went the other way and um what happens next well Well, asset inflation goes through the roof, right? And, you know, this entire conversation of inflation, it's really twisted because everybody talks about consumer prices, CPI, CPI inflation, that we're not getting enough inflation. We're not getting enough inflation. OK, well, like you're not getting you're not getting inflation on YouTube and Netflix streaming videos and candy bars manufactured by robots and factories and Domino's pizza. you're getting inflation on everything you want. If you wanted an Ivy League education,

if you wanted a beachfront house in Miami, if you wanted the apartment in New York, if you wanted anything scarce, everything you want is going up 7%. And that's asset inflation. Well, if I want a bond that's going to yield $50,000 a year, it used to cost a million bucks. And this year, it cost $10 million. The cost of the asset went up by 2%? No. I have a house in Miami Beach. It was a nice house built in the 1930s.

And I have the deed of sale for the house. $100,000 for that house in 1930. It's gone up in price by a factor of $100,000. is like you know so no inflation kind of inflation but it's different it's asset inflation so i didn't really think about it until i got slugged in the face with the two by four which kind of happened around march or april when main street shut down the economy shut down and bonds went through the roof when municipal ponds went up while every city is bankrupt when every when Apple stock and every other public tech equity went up and the multiples blew out and the economy

went to the worst place I've seen in 30 years, at that point, you start having a thought with yourself, which is what is the true inflation rate? And we should probably coin a different term, right? If you looked at asset inflation on a good year for the last decade, it's 7% a year normal, right? This year, you can make an argument it was 25%. I mean, if you look at the long bond index, and if you look at these equities, you can make an argument that the asset inflation rate leaped to 25% and 30% depending. And now, what does that mean to me metaphorically? Well, here's how I feel. I felt like I had $500 million of cash in the bank safe, and it was yielding two, 3% and I'm ready for a rainy day. And then I'm starting to do stuff with it. And then every

month, some banker sends me a note saying the interest went down. It went down. Now there is no interest. And then someone took my cash out of the bank and they put it in the backyard in pallets. And then they opened my back gate. And then every month someone comes along and starts burning 2% of the money. And then I started thinking, well, in 12 months, 25% of the money is going to be gone. And then I started thinking, what is the point of all this? What am I doing wrong? And of course, the answer is you can't hold cash. And so what do you do with it? Right. Well, I mean, so hold on a second here. So you realize the macro issues. Um, I think there was a couple of different things that happened, right? So the macro issues happen. You're sitting

there, you're in a very unique situation because you have so much cash on the company's balance sheet. Um, you run a business that throws off a lot of cash, right? So you kind of have that advantage. It actually improves economically. Like you described in terms of your costs are going down, that the structure of your contracts are weathering very well through the storm. And so you remain in a strong business position where you have cash. And actually, the cash is growing not through investment. It's growing from your income. And you begin to get worried about that. How do you get to crypto? And I'm leaving you a little bit in terms of you've got a friend who basically kind of hit you over the head a second time. So let me tell that story as to

kind of what pushes you to at least go explore crypto. And then we can talk about kind of what you do. But just talk through that process of like how you actually arrive at, OK, crypto is a potential solution. You know, when times are good, everybody's busy. You know, if you're in love with the iPhone, then the answer to everything is iPhone. If you're in love with your Apple Watch, when you're in love with Twitter, the answer is, you know, that, you know. So when times are good everybody focuses on that and there's only limited time so i i think i was closed to the possibility it's just there's so many other things going on and um when uh the covid crisis hit everybody got sent home and we all had to had to contemplate ideas that we had

previously rejected and we had to embrace ideas that that just were very foreign to us so how do I discover crypto? Well, first, I have a mega, mega, mega problem. And the mega problem is I have a lot of cash, and I'm watching it melt away. And I'm helped to realize I have a mega problem by this insane V recovery in the bond market and the equity market and all of the talking heads. so after after that then i have an opportunity which is i've got a cash generating business and then i've got one more problem which is the investors the outside investment community if you go to them and say hey we're a great enterprise software company and we've got all this cash their answer is well we don't really value the cash what i mean because they're smarter than i

am right now i'm not being i'm not joking i'm being serious they are smarter than i am they knew before i knew that cash is trash and you're a fool to sit on the cash you're just if the natural asset inflation rate is 10 it means that every time i generate 50 million in operating income i burn 50 million in purchasing power on the cash and we're just running as hard as we can to stand still so we weren't getting any credit for the cash we didn't need the cash ergo we need to do something and so what is the thing you're going to do and we started working through it like what do you do if you have 500 million dollars of cash you don't need well you can buy your own stock back right there's a limit to how fast you can do it if you go into a market and a thinly

traded stock and you're buying 20 of the float every day you know that's going to take about four years right it's like you you know if if your account if your ice cube is melting 15 or 20 a year you don't got four years or at least you know inflation is going to do a better job so that didn't really make sense so we had we got kicked into high gear like everybody got kicked into high gear this year right if you didn't know how to use zoom you know like we started we started uh on a monday morning with one video conferencing technology we discarded it i'm not going to say which one we discarded it for another one by 11 a.m by 2 p.m we're using zoom by 4 p.m the ceo sends out an edict zoom is not the corporate standard everyone will switch over

to Zoom starting tomorrow. And by the way, the same CEO that said, I don't believe in remote work. You've got to show up to the office or else you're not working for me. And I would have sworn up and down, I hated remote work until COVID crisis hit, flip. And so that same idea happened with the balance sheet. There are all these strongly held views. You've got to be conservative. You've got to invest in cash and short-term T-bills. And you don't contemplate anything else. and then all of a sudden you contemplate other things so i mean you're an expert you tell me if you had 500 million dollars of cash right now where would you invest it uh i'm cheating because you and i see eye to eye now i'd go buy a lot of bitcoin okay and so if you didn't know

what you know but you were an intelligent person and you watched youtube and you watched everything else. What would be your laundry list of assets to consider investing in? Yeah, it basically be all the inflation hedge assets, right? You look at everything from real estate, precious metals, Bitcoin, you kind of just go down the line, hard assets that have some sort of inflation hedge type qualities that really are more kind of wealth preservation than anything would be the general bucket to at least go start exploring with. Okay, so let's take through them. commercial real estate how do you go buy 500 million dollars worth of commercial real estate at a fair price that's not an impaired asset by something happening in the economy right now

how many people want to sell you commercial real estate at a fair price right now that is not impaired they all think it's still worth what it was worth in january okay so that you know that's kind of difficult so what's my next thing go buy i'm not so silly as to go buy like uh 20th century stock go buy apple amazon facebook you know twitter oh by the way back in 2012 i wrote the mobile wave you know what i said in the mobile wave i said go buy facebook amazon apple twitter it was a good idea in 2012 if you had done it then you would have made 10 times your money very good idea not the same idea this week right i mean at this point you know is is apple computer going to go up by a factor of 10 from here right maybe it might double it might be cut in half but

you know you're with the best equity in the world you gotta you've got equal upside downside you're really just yeah there's no asymmetric exactly and so when you started to look at this um did you look at real estate precious metals and bitcoin or kind of what was what was the on the menu if you will for evaluation i went okay and this is where i got it i got to give a plug to my friend eric weiss eric weiss running his own bitcoin bitcoin investment you know advisory service you know and he's saying this is what i'm doing and i'm just dismissing him like i have one of this bitcoin thing i don't know what it is but it's crazy crypto and it's like shell game so he just he keeps mentioning it and i keep thinking about it and then then one day we're

sitting around my pool in miami and he starts explaining it and something clicks in my head that maybe this is a pretty good idea you know like i i have been beaten over the head with a two by four and so i'm a bit more open-minded but i started thinking about it and then i realized I really got to look at precious metal. Now you go to the Robert Kiyosaki, silver, gold, or Bitcoin, choose one. And so we get down to choosing, are we going to invest in precious metals or Bitcoin? I already dismissed commercial real estate. I dismissed a market basket of equities, the spider, NASDAQ 100. That stuff's just not compelling. I tell you what I want, right what i want is something that that might be cut in half that can go up by a factor of 10

asymmetric payoff by the way that's what any intelligent investor wants that's what you want when you bought amazon in 2011 that's what you were getting when you bought apple computer when the iphone came out that's what every every rational winner is getting you want a 10x upside and then you want yeah i can even live with losing all the money although here's the catch You know, like every good investment, in my opinion, if you're going to put a lot of money at work, the winning formula for the past 10 years or 15 years has been find a digital dominant network that's dematerialized some fundamental thing. The mobile network is Apple, the information network at Google, the video network, YouTube, you know, the social network, Facebook, even Twitter, a speech network, dematerialize and Amazon, the retail network.

You buy them when they're $100 billion market cap. When something hits $100 billion and by when they're 10 times bigger than the next biggest thing and they're a hundred billion dollars, they're probably going to crush everything. And at that point, like, you know, I remember lecturing Wall Street guys in 2011, 2012 about Apple, you know, and here's what they said is, well, we know you love Apple and you think it's going to beat the world. But, you know, our idea is if Apple goes up too high, we're going to sell the stock and we're going to buy HP and Dell so we can diversify your computer portfolio. And then if all your tech names, if Apple and Amazon and Facebook go up too much,

we're going to sell those so you don't get too much in technology. And my answer was, what you know, if you think about it broadly, there's no example of a successful company in the history of the world that wasn't a technology company. Standard Oil was a technology company. If you go and go to Hershey's factory, you'll find they figured out how to manufacture 50,000 candy bars in a clean room. And it's the most sophisticated piece of technology you will ever see in your life. You think they're not technology companies. You're just ignorant. There is no there is no winning investment in a company that's not a technology company at their time. General Electric. There was a time when electricity was interesting technology.

Boeing, same thing, before we could fly. So the idea you sell too much tech is a foolish idea, in my opinion. The idea that you sell Apple when it gets too big is another foolish idea. Like, well, there's never been a company that was $500 billion in market cap or trillion, right? There are people saying that. There's never been a company as valuable as Apple because there's never been a company as valuable as Apple. And another way to say that is there's never been a company that could create a software camera, change the way it works, and ship it to a billion people overnight for a nickel. And if you could actually ship a product to a billion people overnight for a nickel, you could create a lot of value with no cost.

So obviously, these digital networks, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, you could see them. They're all around us. They're insanely value generating. But there's another dynamic here, which is the network effect, right? Metcalfe's law. it's like as soon as as soon as everybody uses facebook you know you can't how do i get 257 of my closest friends to switch to the next thing it's really hard like twitter you know how do you get all of your followers on twitter to switch to the next speech network you think you know even if you know even if a guy has a massive following on Twitter. You think he's going to switch to another thing? Probably not. He's going to be the last person to leave. So you're buried in concrete there. So now we come back to Bitcoin. OK, the number one knock on Bitcoin for the outsider is, well,

it's just software. Someone else can copy it. And I think Bitcoiners, they don't do themselves justice here. I mean, sometimes I think the exchanges and some of the others, they over promote the fact that there's 237 different crypto pairs you can trade. Right. And I've done that. It's like that. It's that long tail where all of a sudden there's one thing and I want to have a list of 47 things. But but, you know, what's an epiphany? You know, the epiphany is when you're a young CEO and you're like, I'm going to put a salesperson in every single state in America. There's 50 states, 50 salespeople. There's an epiphany when you go to New York City and you realize that half of all the money in the country is in one city. And then you realize that maybe

you're being captured by orthodoxy. So in this entire crypto area, it's great to have all the innovation and it's good to experiment with this and that and DeFi and maybe that'll work and maybe that'll work and maybe that'll work but to the outsider the outsider you look at it and you're like well what if everybody moves their money off of bitcoin to the to ether or to whatever or to yo-yo coin and you know and they stop and and then someone puts this language eight pages of language in front of you what happens if there's a hard fork or a soft fork you know how debilitating anxiety-inducing that would be to deliver eight pages of legal disclaimers on hard fork, soft fork risk. You mean like my crypto can float away and they get all anxiety ridden. So you've got to get

beyond that. And it's easy to get beyond that. The easy way to get beyond it is to say, look, this is a proof of work crypto network designed to be a store of value. And the only thing we're going to do is maintain a constant store of value as a digital gold and we're going to expend huge amounts of energy to protect that network and upgrade that network and you can take your 500 million dollars out of the bank and put it on our network and everybody in the community is going to spend every iota of their energy to make sure no one f's with that network okay okay all right so hold on. So when you, when you start to understand this, uh, it sounds like you pretty astutely Bitcoin, everything else, there was a separation in your mind in terms of understanding that.

Uh, and as you were learning about that, were you going into this, um, with an open mind as, uh, I don't even remember that I tweeted this thing, you know, in the past, I know I've got this problem this is the promise of this thing is a store of value like let me go explore it or do you basically have people who are kind of guiding you and pushing you and saying hey this is the solution this is your solution like is this a self-guided tour or is this externally guided why i am completely oblivious to any previous opinion i had had than the before but i i didn't follow bitcoin all through the 2017 bitcoin cash for any of the fireworks that were very colorful i missed it all right okay so i you know i show up with

the queen slate in 2020 and i'm reading about this as history and i'm looking at you know andreas's you know videos and your videos and dan held's videos and i'm reading the bitcoin standard by safer dean and i'm reading parker lewis's essays and you got it you got indoctrinated by the Bitcoin community. You got hit with all the content. Yeah. And all the maximalists and I'm seeing Max Keiser. And I'm starting to figure, oh, there seems to be some interesting drama here, but it's more entertaining for me. And here's the thing that really just kicks you over the edge, though. It's just when you go to real Bitcoin dominance and you look at bitcoin and then bitcoin cash and then the next one the next one you realize okay bitcoin is 92

percent of everything and the next competitor is two percent and then the next competitor is 1.5 percent okay the number one knock on bitcoin is well maybe it's the myspace to facebook it's like absolutely not if you know anything about myspace you realize that myspace was never worth more than a billion dollars. MySpace was 200 times smaller than Bitcoin is right now. It was never that case. There's never an example of a $100 billion monster digital network that was vanquished once it got to that dominant position. So all you got to do is see that chart. And then you think about the dynamic and the network effect. And you're like, this is already one, right? It's one, it's been tested. And, you know, and by the way, the hard forks, I think are a big advantage. The fact that the fact

that Bitcoin went through it, and we saw what happened, and we saw that the community would defend Bitcoin. That's what gives a person like me confidence to invest hundreds of millions of in Bitcoin. I don't want to hear that you've got a new idea and you're upset over transaction fees and you would like to implement smart contracts, so you've got to change everything. I don't want to hear that. I want to hear that you're going to defend the network to the death against someone that's going to break it or compromise it in any way, shape, or form. When you decide personally, this is a good idea. I'm going to take a material amount of the $500 million and I'm going to go buy Bitcoin with it. You've got a board, you've got shareholders, you've got regulators. There's

a number of stakeholders, right? That people who either have financial interest in what you're doing or really care about what you're doing from a regulatory standpoint. What are those conversations like? Do you just go to the board and say, hey, there's this thing called Bitcoin. i'm going to take 250 million dollars i'm going to go buy it do you kind of warm them up with some information first like like what is that conversation at the board level like i started signing them homework and they all know you so they you know they've all watched a variety of your podcasts uh they all know andreas they all they all required to watch the debate between eric vorhees and peter schiff on gold on fiat versus bitcoin what is better

money right and then a non-stop stream of essays you know on macroeconomics and bitcoin theory and you know you know the who's who litany of people you've interviewed when alden publishes her piece it goes to my board you know the bullish case for bitcoin goes to the board all of those things And and it's and between them and the general counsel and the CFO and myself, we're all basically just going down the rabbit hole. And following that is, you know, is a series of discussions. One on ones with everybody, everybody goes off, does their own homework. We all come together. Lots of group discussion. We all split. The CFO goes off to organize and start to consult with a raise of accountants.

The general counsel goes off to consult with a raise of attorneys. Then we go off and consult with a raise of financial advisors. Then we consult with a raise of bankers. Then we come back together again, and then we share. Then we have deliberations. Then we deliberate some more. And then we think very carefully about what is the appropriate and prudent way in order to begin to move forward or affect this strategy. to your goals. Is your aim to accumulate Bitcoin during market dips, generate profits from Ethereum

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BitGet currently leads in tokenized trade by market, providing the industry's lowest fees and highest liquidity across 150 regions worldwide. Check them out at bitget.com today. That's B-I-T-G-E-T.com today. All right. So the first purchase is $250 million. You announced today that you did another $175 million. So you're now at $425 million, which is almost all of that $500 million of cash or

a good portion of it. Walk us through, I got a ton of questions around what I'll call operationally investing hundreds of millions of dollars. So how do you think about entering the market and trying not to move price? How do you think about OTC, desks? Obviously, for those who are listening who might be confused, Michael and the team is not going on Coinbase and letting a $400 million market order rip. So there's some very thoughtful things that go into this. Let's talk first just about how do you actually acquire this much Bitcoin without moving price? And before we get there, I'll make one more point. We had $500 million in cash. We wanted to buy our own stock back with it or put it into some asset like Bitcoin. Our first step is to announce that we're thinking that through. our second step is announce a tender offer for our stock, $250 million. That took place the same

day we announced that we bought the $250 million in Bitcoin. Then we have a 20-day period where we wait for our shareholders to decide if they're going to tender and how much. So we had to move through that. When we got done, we actually bought $60 million worth of our stock. That hit the wire in the last few days too. So our real goal was to invest it all. Got it. So it was $250 in Bitcoin. The tender ends up being $60 million or so. So you're at like $310 million. And then you had another $175 million that you could play with and still keep some cash in the bank. Yeah. And it's the shareholder's decision as to how much of that will be tender. So we wait for them. And then after the tender offer, we had excess cash in

our treasury. So the next step is for us to invest our treasury cash. So that's what we announced today but we've wrapped it all up so substantially 95 of that money is either invested in our stock or in bitcoin and we've accomplished that in short order right like over the course of six weeks or four weeks now uh regarding acquiring that much bitcoin first of all i can't give you like exact blow-by-blow details because i've got security issues and the world is watching and i i can't but what i can do is is is i can describe to you if you were running a company how you should think about this you know if you were in my position which is you're going to go and you're on you're going to audition a bunch of uh a bunch

of institutional grade exchanges. You're going to work through and look for institutional grade custodians. You're going to look at all of the security issues, all the technology issues, et cetera. You're going to think about the team. You're going to build a relationship with them. And then you're going to buy,

if you're going to buy that much, you're going to buy it in thousands or tens of thousands or a hundred thousand plus small transactions day and night minute by minute over the like over the course of many many many days so so it's not like we're going in i'll sit and i'll watch this happening and i've got a great team you know a great team that i've worked with and some excellent professionals they are brilliant geniuses are what they do but let me tell you they've got great technology too right it's like and you got to have the right technology you got to have the right team and then you have to be very patient like very very patient you know like i'll watch people walk in on monday morning and

you know i was like okay some dude just got up at 9 a.m and decided to buy some bitcoin and the price spikes you know whenever i see that i'm like well that guy won't be in the market very long because no one that really wanted to buy a lot of bitcoin would be so silly as to spike the price so hard you know i i can tell you this which is we bought 425 million dollars worth of it and we never ran the price not a dollar like you don't know impressive yeah it's pretty impressive i'm in the market, you wouldn't know that I'm trading against you ever because that's not how you get stuff done. Let the market come to you. So the good news is if you want to buy hundreds of millions or sell hundreds of millions, you can do it and not be seen. And you can do it without

moving the market materially or panicking anybody. But you have to have the right team, the right tools and the right discipline, you can't be in a hurry. Got it. That makes sense. How has the reaction been from other CEOs or people who are outside the company? I'm assuming that you've gotten people coming inbound that are peers. Are they laughing at you? Are they excited? Are they asking, how did you do this? Why did you do this? What are those conversations like? well first of all i think this is a year where every ceo is busy like minding his own business right like that that they've either got a business that that that has serious serious solvency issues or or struggle or they've got a business that's being digitally disrupted or

twisted one way or the other and and or they've got all sorts of of employee care and feeding issues so this is not the year where a lot of ceos are necessarily sitting around shooting the whatever about you know what's happening this year right everybody's kind of all hands on deck working hard uh the people i do speak to though and i speak to some i would say everybody has uh has had a lot of their assumptions shaken this year assumptions about you know how the market will behave assumptions about regulations right i mean assumptions about international business assumptions about their balance sheet and things that were inconceivable last year right oracle tiktok you know all sorts of

interesting things that you you will see on the paper and people will just like nod and they're like not even a second thought like oh yeah that's happening that's happening all those things are are are being considered this year to a much greater degree so i i do have people coming to me and and and they want to know how do we think about it and why do we do it and you know and they're all starting to look to think what's their angle on this now and so i think it's catalyzing people to be much more open-minded. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Do you feel like you've kind of broken the dam open and now a bunch of people will follow? Or do you think that this is kind of a slowly but surely it will take a lot of time for more to kind of follow in

your footsteps? I think it's like the four-minute mile. I think the people told themselves they couldn't do it and then someone does it. And then in the next year, dozens and dozens of people do it. This particular case, there's a lot of stuff that I've done in my career that was a lot harder than this. I will say any entrepreneur that ever successfully launches a business and gets to profitability will have accomplished something much harder than what we did. It's a challenging project, but it's not beyond the capability of any management team. I think that a lot of people just kind of had a mental block, or it's just in this block of I just dismiss it, I don't even consider it, and then they get focused on something else. My own experience is from the day

that I decided that I wanted to buy Bitcoin, if I decided on that day as an individual, you go to these high-end exchanges, it's going to be six weeks to get through the KYC for an individual if you want to do it. If you're a company, a private company, and if you had your team all around you, from the point that you thought it was interesting, you're 12 weeks to 18 weeks to get through the hoops. If you're a nimble publicly traded company, I think you're looking at six months. And if you're a good company, like just a good rational publicly traded company, you put on the docket, you would do it in nine to 12 months. And so I think that people were kind of oblivious to the need slash the role of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin narrative

of digital gold right this is the ultimate inflation hedge this is this is if it's it's not 10x better than gold it's 100x maybe it's a thousand x better than gold we could go on for hours i could tell you why i think it's a thousand x better than gold but let's just assume since we're preaching to the choir that it's a thousand x better than gold once you realize that it's a thousand x better than gold from that point it's minimum 12 weeks if you went like a bat out of hell and probably six months and i kind of feel that if people were waiting to see if this was possible well they kind of saw our announcement august so the six month clock starts in august if if they were uh super if they were just perfectly configured if they had all the same

characteristics as us then they start focusing on this in may or june nobody's thinking about this in march or april it was just so busy trying to keep the doors open and and their bells getting wrong so take august and say august september october i you know december january i think that what you're going to see is over the next two three four months something interesting and um you know the the other point right that's not not lost upon me is there's 3 500 publicly traded companies there's five trillion dollars in their treasuries and it's all melting and and yeah at some point you have a fiduciary obligation to not lose the money okay you know like it's it used to be acceptable to be conservative but that was before the asset

inflation rate went from six percent to thirty percent you know when the inflation rate goes to thirty percent it's not necessarily something you can ignore so i think that a lot of people are getting catalyzed right now i think um i think it has to be kind of ceo cfo led right because it is an innovative thing but i i think that uh that we've shown people how to do it you know and we've shown them that it's it's possible and straightforward and and once it's like anything if i tell you it's possible go figure it out on the internet or go figure on youtube you can figure it out yourself right all you got to know is that it's possible You know, it's possible to run 52 miles in a single day. Go figure it out. You're going to go Google 52 miles in a single day and then all of a sudden fall down the rabbit hole. So I think people now know it's possible, but I don't think you can expect them to move in less than six months reasonably in a year.

how are you thinking about and last question before we get into the rapid fire how are you thinking about the volatility right so obviously uh it's one of the most volatile assets that you could have chosen um and when we talk about volatility it's not like hey it may go up to two percent or down two percent you can have double digit percentage days uh up or down um does that change your strategy is this just your long-term holding it for you know years and years just kind of how do you think about that well so first of all i think the volatility is falling and i i think all you gotta do is look at the chart and i there's a narrative like everybody's like everybody wants to say that they know something about crypto wants to jump up and

say well you know it's volatile well what was volatile in 2017 you know when like individuals were trading it on their mobile phone but yeah think about what i just what i just said about how we acquired it. We buy $175 million. I'm in the market every minute of the day for multiple days in a row. I'm damping the volatility. One person like me, right? In every trading day that I'm in the market, I'm damping it to the upside and the downside, and I'm damping it with large sums of money, right? And, and so how many of how many institutions does it take before they damp it? Right? Like, I'm the, I'm the dude, I'm like, okay, I'll pay an extra whatever, but stop this thing. I'm holding it for 100 freaking years, right? It's like, I'm not really, I'm not the

day trader guy that's worried about it. So I think that as the institutions come in, and as they buy bigger amounts, they're damping the volatility. And that's my first observation. My second observation is crypto trades 168 hours a week every other asset trades 35 hours a week at best and sometimes less on holidays right you're trading i look at this thing in awe you know when i look at these exchanges saturday night 9 30 p.m and i'm watching the thing stream and i'm like This is the most magical, hardest working security in the history of the world. And I would think everybody ought to be in awe that the thing's not going haywire. It's remarkably non-volatile in that regard.

Like, in my opinion, you could go into the market and you could liquidate $50 or $100 million worth of this stuff in a matter of an hour, any hour of the day, any day of the week on a holiday, and maybe you take a 3% haircut. But go try to liquidate $100 million of gold on a Saturday afternoon in Istanbul on the street side. So my answer is, I don't think it's that volatile. But my other answer, beyond this, let's be honest, there's a negative real yield on everything else I can buy. Gold's got a negative 3%, 4%, 5% real yield, in my opinion. and we talk about why. Bonds have a negative real yield. It's just a question. We're just going to debate, is it a 7% asset inflation or 15% or 3%? But it doesn't really matter.

Every other non-volatile asset is a negative real yield, which means that everything else is lifeblood draining out of my veins. So if my choice would be to accept some volatility and live, or i had non-volatile cash that bought 30 less in a matter of eight weeks non-volatile that was 30 less at that rate you're not going to make it through the decade and so volatility is just something you got to live with but i but i really think there's there's there's a group of crypto enthusiasts that lived the last 10 years. And they are the result of their experience. They lived through a difficult time and they're heroes. I respect them. But you live through that. You live through volatility. I think the next 10 years are not going to look like that. I think the next

10 years, as you have people coming in that are moving hundreds of millions of dollars in and out of the market, they're going to tend to damp all the volatility and the institutions are going to dampen because in their interest and so if there is any it's just going to be to the upside for the good of everybody and otherwise not a big problem for me i literally think that is the perfect way to look at this is uh what is it 200 billion dollar asset today uh market cap wise go to eight nine trillion you're looking at 40 plus x right to the gold market cap and uh You're talking about an asset that is superior in almost every single way. And so if you think it's just going to be equal on a market cap basis, you're not a student of history because we know that they usually tend to have much larger market caps.

And so when you start to look at just the numbers, you can not only put big numbers to work in the market, but also the upside of this thing is incredible over a long enough time period. It's pretty crazy. Gold is a great narrative. But to say that this is much better than gold undersells it, because the truth is, if you look at these treasuries, there's something like $200 trillion worth of debt instruments and other treasury instruments that have a negative real yield. And precious metal is just one of them. So if you're looking at $10 trillion in gold, there's easily $100 trillion of, you know, what is this, shadow money, $75 trillion of that, $75 trillion of sovereign debt, $50 trillion of other stuff. So you're really looking at $200 trillion or more of negative real yield. The only debate is how negative it is. And Bitcoin is the only thing I could find that's positive. You know, if I could find another thing, we'd be talking about it.

No brainer. I ask the same two questions to everybody. to uh finish up what is the most important book you've ever read okay you're gonna hate me for this but it's the moon is a harsh mistress okay and uh you know robert heinlein was my favorite author growing up i'm a rocket scientist and of course it's it's uh it's about a protagonist computer whose name is mike who saves the moon so i like that a lot and i like and i grew up with that it was very inspirational so speaking of the moon aliens believer or non-believer i think they're out there i think that i think that there's so many stars and galaxies and

planets statistically it just seems to be impossible that somewhere there isn't somebody i uh i tend to agree with you the galaxy is very very big uh you get asked me one question to uh to finish up what's the one question you got for me jack dorsey has a one word twitter bio and that one word is bitcoin And he's also got $10 billion in cash and cash equivalents between Twitter and Square. And to my knowledge, none of it is invested in Bitcoin, either Square or Twitter. You want to help me try to persuade Jack to like, you know, break off a small $500 million or billion and go buy some Bitcoin?

Because I know he loves the community, and I know he's doing as much as he can to help, but the single most useful thing he could do to help is lead on the corporate treasury side. If he bought a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, what do you think happens the next day? I think that he's thought about it, would be my guess. my guess is that there are bigger problems that he perceives in terms of activist investors and kind of, you know, he's, he's always the, I joke and say, show me another entrepreneur. Who's built two tens of billions of dollar market cap companies and is running them simultaneously. And yet somehow people still have a problem with the guy,

which is insane to me. I don't, he's an amazing guy and he's inspirational. But it's not like he shirks controversy. Oh, no, no, no. Look, I absolutely think that, again, this is me speaking my opinion. Obviously, I've never talked to Jack about this. I don't have any inside information. I would guess that if it was his choice, he would absolutely do it if he kind of had sole power.

I think that, you know, you kind of pick your battle sometimes. And my guess is that when Elliott management is knocking on the door and basically got a target on your back as the CEO, the first thing you don't want to propose in the board meeting is, hey, why don't we take $500 million and go buy Bitcoin? Fair enough. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that that wouldn't be the right thing to go do. Just you got to pick your battles sometimes. We can get the crypto community to give them some air cover or go wage a charm offensive on all of those boards. And what we need is we need the Bitcoin community to go like meme Elliot management to death and then they'll back off maybe and leave him alone. So I don't know.

But we'll see. Look, I tend to think that there will be many more people who will follow this. I think you're right in terms of it'll just take a little bit of time for them to kind of get geared up and do it. I don't know if people will do as much as you guys did on a percentage basis kind of out of the gate. It feels like maybe people start with 5%, 10% just because humans are naturally just – they lack conviction. They want to be conservative. They feel like they're being prudent, whatever. I tend to think, actually, the argument you laid out is not only conservative because you're actually protecting the cash, but it's also very prudent in the sense of how you did 50% into Bitcoin, 50% as a tender, and then doubled up or filled up with the rest in Bitcoin. And so we'll see what happens. But if no one has said it to you yet, we're cheering you on. So keep going because it's pretty incredible that you did this. And I said it when you first put out the very first press release that you guys bought the original Bitcoin purchase. I said to multiple people, I said, look, this isn't somebody who doesn't understand what they're doing. It was very clear in the language you used in the press release, etc. This is a Bitcoiner who is running this company and very much understands the macro environment, their asset choices, if you will. And has chosen Bitcoin for, I think, all of the reasons that the Bitcoin community is attracted to it. And so that, for whatever reason, came through pretty clearly to me in that press release. So it was cool to see.

Yeah, well, I guess I would end just by saying that I find the entire Bitcoin community to be inspirational. And I did note in our press release, one of the key drivers of our belief and the success of this is the community ethos. It's a pretty amazing group of people. And all of the thinking and all of the initiatives, I just find to be extraordinary. And I think that we wouldn't be doing what we're doing without everybody that's ever passed through this podcast that means a lot um how can people find you on the internet or find out more about micro strategy um micro strategy is microstrategy.com um michael underscore sailor at twitter you can probably google me and you'll get every single one of my contacts if you want

listen Michael thank you so much for doing this this was fantastic and we will absolutely do this again at some point in the future well thanks for having me