Fireside chat with Paolo Ardoino & Brandon Lutnick

I am no analyst. I'm just a mere podcaster, but if I had to guess, if I had to make a prediction, I would say that by the year 2030, Tether will probably own more US treasuries than China and perhaps more Bitcoin than the United States of America. I mean, they already own more treasuries and Bitcoin than Germany, but that's not saying much on the Bitcoin side of things. It really is not, because everyone in this room owns more Bitcoin than Germany. I'm sorry for dunking on Germany so much today. I love my German Bitcoiners. Up next, we have a fireside chat with Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, and Brandon Lutnick, chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please give them a very big welcome.

What a nice background.

Thank you, Paolo. It's really, really nice to be here. I'm not a day-one Bitcoiner or Tether supporter, but when I joined, I think we joined hard, and this is my third Plan B. Lugano's become a second home to me a little bit because of you, so I appreciate you there. And I'm just super excited to be here. And guys, if you didn't know, Paolo's birthday was two days ago. So, happy birthday, Paolo.

He looks amazing. He looks amazing. No. So, look, I'd love to give you guys a little bit more color on Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald was founded in 1945 by Bernie Cantor, who I'm actually named after. And Bernie became the mentor to my father, Howard Lutnick. My father worked at Cantor for 40 years and he ran Cantor for 30. My father had a motto which was: you spend so much time at work, you should work with the people you love. So hire your friends. He had a motto about a rainbow of friends. On one side of the rainbow, you have friends that are so funny, they make you laugh so hard at a bar that you spit out your beer. On the other side, you have your smart, normal, great friends. So let's hire those ones at the firm, right? And that was true for him all the way from the top to the bottom of the firm. My dad hired his brother Gary, his best friend Doug, his roommate from college, you name it. And that's what made September 11th, 2001 so devastating. 9/11, when the planes hit the towers, it was the largest terrorist attack in world history. Almost 3,000 people died that day. 658 of those people were Cantor friends and family. Everyone in the building that day passed away. Cantor was located on the 101st to 105th floor of the World Trade Center. Very luckily, my father wasn't in the building because he was taking my brother Kyle, who's in the crowd here somewhere, to his first day of kindergarten. So thank you, Kyle. We lost almost 700 people and the firm was about 2,000 employees globally. You can imagine how devastating that was. You're losing almost 40% of your company, but all these people you know and loved and cared about. But that didn't stop my father. He promised to rebuild the company and take care of all the families in the process. He promised 25% of all of his profits to go back to the families and he ended up giving the families $180 million over the next 10 years. And we created a standing job offer for all of the kids of those families at Cantor. We've had about 200 kids come and go, and about 30 work at the firm today. On 9/11 the firm was about 2,000 employees globally. Today we're 14,000, and we're having our best year ever. It's really across three companies. The first one is Newmark, which is public. It's the third largest real estate commercial brokerage firm. Second one is BGC, which is the largest wholesale exchange. And the final one is Cantor, a leading premier private investment bank. That means a lot to me and us because we're private. What that allows us to do is really just skate to where the puck is going. If you think about the crypto world and the last five years, it wasn't loved, right? The arms weren't open to Tether, to Bitcoin, to the world. But because we were private, Cantor saw the future, realized how special the digital world could be, and we committed to it. There's no bureaucracy. There's no hoops to jump through. When we really want to commit to a space, we can commit. And that's been a huge, huge thing for us. And I'm super excited to be here next to you, Paolo.