The Wolf Of All Streets - "Bitcoin Will Be $10 Million!” The Future Of Capital Markets w/ Michael Saylor

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

Michael Saylor joins to discuss why he believes Bitcoin has become the world’s true form of “digital gold” and how institutional adoption is accelerating faster than ever. He breaks down the transformation of the digital asset industry, the rise of Bitcoin-backed credit instruments, and Strategy’s latest financial innovations like STRK and STRC. Saylor also explains how major banks, regulators, and rating agencies are finally embracing Bitcoin, why this marks a pivotal shift for global finance, and how the future of digital capital could completely rewrite the rules of corporate credit and investment.

No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. I think we created in strategy the world's most tax-efficient, scalable generator of fixed income. I mean, the truth is, obviously, I'm biased, but I think most of this credit is garbage. The worst thing we sell is five times over-collateralized, and it's been unrated. The best investment-grade bond in the world isn't three times over-collateralized. So the worst thing we sell is better than the best thing of the conventional finance establishment. Michael, you've been on a bit of a tear buying Bitcoin for a few years here. You added 390 more Bitcoin this week you announced bringing the total to

give or take 640,000 Bitcoin over 3% of the total supply. So I think a natural place to start the conversation is why Bitcoin and what is Bitcoin to you? You know, I think the last 12 months, we've had a lot of clarity with regard to that. The digital assets industry is kind of bifurcated into two segments. There's digital capital and then there's digital finance. and Bitcoin has emerged as digital gold, but a store of value. That's a capital as a store of value. And that started with the SEC approving the ETFs about a year and a half ago,

but really the catalytic event was in March at the Crypto Summit, the White House. And at the end of that day, David Sachs said, you know, Bitcoin is digital gold. And he said it publicly, that's the... That's the policy of the administration. So from that point forward, you had kind of this rippling viral global consensus and everything kind of just locked into place. Okay, that's digital gold. What's the killer app for gold?

It's gold-backed credit. For 300 years, the Western world ran on currencies and credit instruments that were backed by gold all the way up until Nixon took us off the gold standard in 71. So, half the industry is digital capital, which is Bitcoin, and then digital credit. The credit instruments built above it. And we've just, we have just laser-like focused upon building out that stack. The other half of the industry, which has really exploded in vitality over the past 12 months with the new administration, is digital finance. And it's basically the tokenization of currencies, the tokenization of stocks.

of bonds, of real-world assets, of brands, every type of tokenized application, and that has been a massive tailwind and source of energy for all of the proof-of-stake networks. These are not new narratives to people who have been in the Bitcoin space for quite a while, but we're finally seeing a catch-fire, as you mentioned. And not only at the retail level,

but at the institutional level, and a day doesn't pass anymore where you don't get a major announcement from a Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Citibank, Wells Fargo, about either custodying the assets. J.P. Morgan last Friday announcing they'll accept Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral. You were very early, obviously, to the institutionalization of Bitcoin. So what do you make of this trend of institutionalization? Where are we on that path?

I think for Bitcoin and the entire crypto industry, for it to 10x from here, the major catalyst is the embrace and adoption by the major banks. So the actions of J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, B&Y Mellon, P&C Bank, the support that's coming from Schwab, from boutique banks like Texas Capitol, all of those are big actors. The actions of Morgan Stanley in the space, they led our IP of Stretch, biggest IPO of the year, and it's basically a Bitcoin-back credit instrument. So I think probably the most auspicious thing is to see, I didn't mention city, but the support that's coming from City, from JP Morgan, from Wells Fargo, from Bank of America, all of those

banks are revising their crypto policies, which were very restrictive and blanketed as of a year ago, and they've changed their view toward the entire industry and toward, you know, crypto assets as collateral in the past, in some cases, four weeks. So this is a very important month. Do you feel in your conversations that those are a reluctant embrace or that they're actually excited? You know, I give them the benefit of a doubt. If you roll back to the crypto winner, the regulators shut down, you know, and I would say almost a sense. assassinated Silvergate and Signature Bank. Those were two good banks that were put out of business by the previous administration. On a Sunday. And that traumatized the entire banking establishment,

right? If you combine that with the guidance that came from the Fed and the regulators, I think they were all traumatized in their view as like, hey, the bank's been around for 100 years. I'm not going to blow it up on my watch. And so they all took very conservative, you know, extremely paranoid policies, and maybe the paranoia was injected into them by the administration. I think after November 5th, we knew there was going to be a new view toward digital assets, but I don't think people realized how constructive and positive it would be until you got 12 pro-crypto, 12 pro-Bitcoin cabinet members, and then Scott Bessent went out of his way as the Secretary of the Treasury to make sure that Treasury and the OCC and the FDIC and

even the Federal Reserve provided very positive constructive guidance of those banks that now it's safe, it's safe for them to start to custody, it's safe for them to start to issue credit and it's safe for them to trade and handle this asset. And so if you look at it from a pragmatic point of view, these are the largest, most risk-adverse organizations in the country. And from the point that it's safe to do something to expect, I would think, oh, it might take four years. And so the fact that it's happening, we're not even in the first anniversary of the election, right? The fact that they're actually moving in the 11th month when it was a death sentence to move 12 months ago, I think that that's very auspicious. And I think you've got to take

your hat off and applaud the people that are running these trillion-dollar organizations that are able to start to lead their organizations to a better place. Now, having said it, they're not crypto-native, they're not tech companies, they're going to move methodically, they've got a lot of people, a lot of moving parts, a lot of constituencies to please. So I think it'll be four years of progression before, you know, maybe the 10% tech leaders have the kind of stack of services that they want. Vanguard came out and said, never. We will never offer these products.

That changed in the last month. And now, to your point, CFTC looks like we're getting a pro-Bitcoin chairman. And Fed Governor Waller last week said the crypto is woven into the fabric of the American financial system. that would have been absolutely mind-blowing even a few months ago. Yeah, 12 months ago, the over-under would have been outrageous. You know, and the irony, though, is Vanguard was very explicitly anti-crypto, anti-Bitcoin, and you know, Scott, who is my biggest shareholder?

I do. Vanguard. Okay, so, you know, no force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come. And right now you have 750 million people in the crypto ecosystem. You have something that, I think, when I got into the space five years ago, it was a $200 billion to $250 billion industry. It was $2 trillion 12 months ago. It's $4.5 trillion right now.

There's an avalanche of capital, an avalanche of people. armies of people, and their view is this is an idea whose time has come. And even, you know, Vanguard got big because they invented equity capital. The Vanguard 500, the idea that you just want to buy a chunk of equity without taking any counterparty risk, you buy a mixture of 500 companies. And that was their big thing, equity is capital. And now we've got digital capital. And, of course, you know, it's a new paradigm. There'll be. a bit slow, but they can't help but invest it because money is indexed to invest in credit and is an index to invest in equity. And once you've got 250 companies that are holding digital

assets, and once you start having credit instruments backed by digital assets, the people that run those funds have to own those things. They can't not. Let's dig into that. Obviously, you mentioned that STRC was the largest IPO of the entire year, and now we're at a point where it's not just about buying and gathering Bitcoin. You've found novel, creative ways to open this wall of capital that couldn't get access to this industry or asset class before, and you seemingly continue to do that with these new releases. So maybe let's talk about the digital credit stack that you've built.

Yeah, well, say Bitcoin is like a 45-vall, 45 ARR asset and you can't you can't like hold money that you need in two weeks in Bitcoin because you might have a lot or not as much so Bitcoin is a long-duration asset you want to hold it for 10 years 120 months and you're going to be on a 45 volatility roller coaster and you're going to make a lot of money and you got to believe in it you get on the street and you ask 100 people do you want that most of them don't want that you retire your grand you know your father your retirees fixed income they don't want that so um what do they want well some people think i want to have my cake and eat

too can i just have 75% of the upside none no downside and just give me the rest as a fat dividend like 8% dividend and that's kind of interesting to people and we created that that's called that's a convertible preferred stock called Strike, STRK, that was the first digital credit instrument we created. Like, upside, 80% of the upside, 10% of the downside, and a fat dividend while you wait. And then the next thing we created was a 10% dividend forever. How do you pay a 10% dividend forever? You won't find Apple or Microsoft. If the CFO of Microsoft walked into the boardroom

and said, I want to pay a 10% dividend forever, he'd get fired. Okay, so we created that because the reason we wanted it is we intend to invest the money forever. We're going to take the billion dollars, and we're going to buy a billion of Bitcoin, and my forecast is Bitcoin goes up 30% for the next 20 years. It goes up 20% forever after that. So our long-term forecast is we know we're going to do double,

maybe triple that, and we want the money forever. So if you have the best use of proceeds or the best collateral, then you can offer the highest yield. And so we did that, and that was the next deal, and that was more successful than strike. And then we created a third deal, a third instrument called STRD, Stride, and there we stripped, this is a joke, we stripped the investor protections off it. We said strife was accumulated preferred with penalties if we missed the dividend, and Stride was a non-cumulative preferred, no penalties if we miss the dividend. And you're like, well, why would anybody want to buy that one? It's because the strife product traded above par, and it was

yielding 9%, and we sold stride below par, and it yields 12.5%. And so if you actually believe in Bitcoin and you like the company, you're getting paid 350 basis points extra. And if you just want the extra three paragraphs, you give up three and a half percent dividend. forever. And so we created a junk instrument on purpose. And along the way, we realized that what people really want is they just want a high-eield bank account. They want a money market that pays them triple. And so the fourth exercise was Stretch, STRC, and it's the one I wish I did first, but I couldn't have done it first without doing the other three to figure out what people wanted. So the idea of stretch is you pay a monthly dividend that's cash. Right now it's 10.25%. When we took

the thing public, it was 9%. But we pay a dividend and we target par value. So we target the instrument to trade between 99 and 101 and it's trading about 98 spot 7 or almost 99 right now. And the idea was, we're going to strip away the delta. There's no upside from Bitcoin. We're going to strip away the risk. We're going to 7x or 10x over collateralize it. We're going to strip away the volatility. The vol of Bitcoin was 50, strike got to 30, or strife got to 20, stride got to 15,

and this got to like 5 to 7. So we stripped the volatility away. And then we stripped the duration away. Instead of you holding it for 120 months, like, how many people want to buy a 20-year bond? Not many. How many people want to buy a 20-year crypto bond? Not many. But how many people want a money market that pays them 10% instead of 4%.

A lot of people want that. So we just kind of created something that looks like a money market instrument, a one-month Bitcoin bond that right now pays. about 10%. And while we did it, in order to do it, we created a variable dividend where the company can change the dividend every month. And so if it's trading weak, we raise the dividend. If it's trading too strong, we lower the dividend. So we kind of created our own currency, Scott, like the pound or the euro. But if you wanted a Bitcoin back to a crypto dollar, we created that instrument with the risk-free rate or the rate of 10.25%.

Now, that's the one we're most excited about because that's the highest degree of financial engineering we've done. It's like extracting kerosene from a barrel of crude oil. It's like pure jet fuel or rocket fuel. Now, along the way, so we ended up creating instruments that yield 9 to 12.5% which is like double or triple most credit. But then we tripped over this very interesting, magical thing.

We didn't expect it. What we realized is if you sell equity to pay the dividend, the dividend becomes tax-free. So the dividends are return of capital dividends, rock dividends, we call them. So what you're doing is you're returning the capital to the shareholder or the creditor. So, Stretch is not a bank account that pays 10.25%. The tax of quote-on yield is 17% if you live in Florida. And it's 20% if you're a New Yorker.

So we created a bank account that pays 17 to 20% by combining digital capital with a digital credit instrument, with a digital treasury company that issues securities to pay the dividend. in. And I'd love to tell you that I had figured it all out before we started, but we really tripped over digital capital, and then we developed digital credit out of desperation to avoid credit risk, and then we used the ATM to fund the dividend, and we discovered it was all going to be a return of capital dividend. And the punchline is, I think we created in strategy the world's most tax-efficient, scalable generator of fixed income. Can you put that in context of what else is available in the market?

People obviously see their savings account yielding 1% in an environment where bonds are 4% or 5%. Obviously, you talked about a 20 or a 10 or a 30-year bond. This is crushing all of those. Yeah, so, you know, so far, the U.S. dollar rate, short, like one-month rate or short-term rate, is the highest in the Western world is 400, 410 basis points right now or something. And money markets are kind of tied to SOFA and USDA. But the banks, banks are paying on average 40 basis points. Like if a lot of banks give you 10, 20, 30, 40 basis points in the U.S.

They're giving you nothing. After the money markets, corporate credit rates are tied to it. So investment grade will get you to five, four and a half, five, percent bank preferreds are yielding five and a half six percent junk bonds or six and a half private credit is seven and a half so conventional credit in the united states is anywhere from four percent in a money market to seven percent for private credit and the banks are giving you very little but that's the best it's going to be in the western world because when you go to Canada it goes ratches down to three percent when you go to Europe, it ratchets down to 1.8%. When you go to Japan, it ratches down to 50 basis points.

In UAE, it might be three. In Singapore, it might be two or less. And in Switzerland, it's negative. And so these rates are pretty much, they're all headed to 200 basis points or less. And so what we're talking about is an effective yield of 5x more than that, but a tax equivalent yield of 10x more than that. And the thing that's interesting about our company is our product is the credit. Like, that is the product. So if you said to me, Mike, you can sell 10% yielding Euro credit and sell $10 billion of it, or you can price it at 5% yielding and sell a billion. The conventional company would take the 5% and sell a billion, but we would take the 10% market it and then go look to sell 100 billion because we want to ship the yield, because our use of proceeds is

paying us 20. And so for us, we're probably the biggest well-run company who's intentionally keeping the capital to invest in Bitcoin and trying to pay the highest possible credit yields. And what we do intentionally, enthusiastically, would get you fired if you worked at Apple or Amazon or Google or Microsoft. So we're repricing the cost of capital, working to invert the world order for corporate finance. And our mission is we want everyone to get paid 10% after tax, or 10% tax deferred on their short-term treasury holdings. That stretch IPO is the biggest IPO of the year. It was one basis point of the Treasury market in the U.S. It's one-one-hundredth of 1%.

Our goal is to be 1%. And if we're 1%, you know, the company's going to be a trillion-dollar company, and we're going to buy $300 billion worth of Bitcoin just with that one little instrument. And what you're offering is incredibly compelling, obviously, in the current environment, but we know that regardless of what Powell does in a couple months, there's going to likely be a Fed chairman who's accommodative as far as

rates going down. So isn't that going to open even a wider ocean between what you're offering and what's readily available? Also, there's $7.5 trillion right now just sitting in money markets waiting for an excuse to enter whatever asset is that investor's favorite flavor of the month. When SOFER falls 100 basis points, all your money markets immediately get repriced down 100 basis points. All the corporate bonds will be repriced down 100 basis points, mortgage back securities, all of the conventional credit instruments of the 20th century. Corporate credit, real estate credit, sovereign credit, it will all be repriced down. Us, we will actually just enjoy the spread, and our message will be, look, now we're even 100 points better than we were, because at end of the day,

again, doomsday for us is, oh, Bitcoin goes up 20% a year instead of 30% a year or 40. So I think the big idea is conventional credit is crippled by design. Like, why would a company pay you more than the bare minimum? They don't want to. But also, conventional credit is built on crumbling, depreciating assets. Like, the credit is backed by hardware that depreciates. It's backed by a house. depreciates. It's backed by an iPhone 17, which will be obsolesed by the iPhone 19. It's backed by a

company that's, you know, got a depreciating interest, or it's backed by currencies that are, you know, being debased. So I think that digital capital rewrites the playbook for credit and digital credit. And, you know me, Scott, I've never really looked at this as a competitive game where the companies in the crypto market are competing with each other. My view is, we are competing with 20th century credit instruments and 20th century equities and 20th century financial entities, right? And so if you come up with a better way to, how many people in the world want to get paid 10 or 12% after tax on their capital, well, like everybody?

So who's losing, and the loser's going to be whoever's selling the junk crippled credit instrument that's backed by a weak company, they'll have to pay a higher rate or they won't get the capital, but the winner will be the investor and the winner will be the nation state, the winner will be the companies that bring these new products to the market. So I think in defy and digital finance, the idea is, hey, let's just do everything a times faster. Move the money at the speed of light, let the computers, you know, trade it a million times a second on the weekend, and let 400 million companies raise capital over the weekend by selling a token instead of taking four years and $40 million of lawyers. That's the

idea. Smarter, faster, stronger, you know, and in the capital markets, in the credit market, it's the same idea. It's like, make the capital work smarter, make it faster, make it stronger, right? And the loser's going to be the 20th century. And the 20th century deserves to lose. Buyers of these instruments, who do they have to be? Do they have to have a deep belief in Bitcoin like you do to believe in these instruments and purchase them? Who do you see as the future buyer of digital credit? The beauty of digital credit is we took all four of those things public on NASDAQ. So any place where you can buy a NASDAQ stock, you can buy them. If you've money locked up in a retirement account in Australia or UK or Europe or 401k, you can buy them.

They just got listed on Robin Hood. We lobbied Robin Hood for about nine months, and those are the first four preferred stocks that Robin Hood ever listed about two, three weeks ago. So you can buy them anywhere. You can buy any security, and they're totally compliant. And in terms of the risk you're taking, well, it's kind of simple. It's backed by Bitcoin. So, if you think Bitcoin's going to zero tomorrow forever, then your collateral is bad, so you don't want to buy it. It's like buying New York real estate if you think New York's going to sink under the ocean next week. If you believe that Bitcoin is a solid capital asset, then that's the first thing. And then the second thing is you have to trust the issuer, which is we're a hundred

billion dollar company in business public since 1998. So we're lucky to be reasonably well-known and credit worthy, and we've got $75 billion a capital. But on that note, right, today was a big milestone for us because S&P just gave its first credit rating to a Bitcoin Treasury company when they gave us a credit rating this afternoon. So we're getting support from the credit rating agencies. We're getting support from our equity investors.

And if you trust the company and you trust Bitcoin, then it's fairly straightforward. It's like at that point, your choice is, you know, do I want 3% from my money market, you know, or do I want 10% or 20% tax equivalent from one of these instruments? How big of a signal is that from S&P to give you such positive credit rating?

Doesn't that actually abstract away a lot of the risk to people that I asked you about? Yeah, I mean, I think we did that. We've been doing the math, and there was like $600 billion to capital that could buy unrated credit instruments and that gets tripled or something just by this one rating.

So we'll tap into a pool of a trillion dollars of additional capital. You know, we've made good progress so far. Like in the first six months, Black Rock's PFF, which is a $15 billion ETF that holds credit and generates yield, they actually allocated like three and a half percent of that fund to our credit instruments. So we managed to get, I think they became one of the biggest investors in Stretch.

They bought $200 million plus of it in one day at one point. So we got some support from credit investors, but I met a lot of insurance companies and a lot of fixed income investors, and they said, tell us when you get a credit rating because then we can buy it. But right now the mandate on our fund is we can only invest in rated credit. So, you know, credit investors are the most risk-adverse investors in the world, and so if the endowment said, do this, but make sure you've got no more than 5% or 10% allocated to this rating level, then as soon as you get that rating level, well, now we actually pay two to three times the yield of everything else. I mean, the truth is, you know, and obviously I'm biased, but I think most of this credit is garbage. It's like preferred stocks from 5,000 banks, and it's They're all opaque, illiquid assets, and they yield you 4% after tax.

And it's like, why would you buy that stuff, right, when you could have something two or three times better or four times? Our preferred stretches 100 times to 200 times more liquid than the stuff that people actually put in your portfolio. So I think it's the things will speak for themselves, but we fight against, you know, the prejudice against, crypto. And you, you know, it's like, well, it's a crypto thing. It might be, the worst thing we sell is five times over collateralized and it's been unrated. The best investment grade bond in the

world isn't three times over collateralized. So the worst thing we sell is better than the best thing of the conventional finance establishment. But, you know, as we say, the struggle is real. And, you know, And we have to, like, walk before we run. And so this is a never-ending non-stop campaign charm offensive to persuade the politicians, persuade the regulators, persuade the credit rating agencies, persuade the big money managers, persuade the megabanks.

Morgan Stanley, the first deal they did where they were the lead underwriter for us was Stretch. It took us five years before we got Morgan Stanley to lead our IPO. So we're winning. But I guess the good news for everybody is we're going to keep winning for the next 10 years, and there's 40 quarters during which Vanguard will first accidentally own my stock, then they will grudgingly let you buy it, then they will allocate 1% to it, and then they'll be like, well, I guess it's a good idea.

And what I say, and I've said it, Scott, and you've heard it, it's like, by the time the bankers tell you it's okay to buy it, it'll cost you a million dollars of Bitcoin, and when they tell you it's a good idea, it'll cost $10 million of Bitcoin. So you're getting a 99% discount right now to do the work yourself and show some courage. And you get a 90% discount when they make it easy for you, but you'll pay 10 times more.

Well, it's been a pleasure watching you do the work for the last five years. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Saylor. Thank you.