Michael Saylor

Executive Chairman, MicroStrategy Inc.

#161 with Michael Saylor - Why Michael Saylor Believes Bitcoin is Hope

🎥 Feb 01, 2021 📺 BlackNova Productions ⏱ 94m 👁 36 views

Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ --------- --------- Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) discuss: 5:30 How Michael sells domain names for millions 23:19 Why Bitcoin is the solution to every company's treasury problems 37:34 How Michael forecasts the cost of capital 45:25 Why fixing MicroStrategy's balance sheet, fixed the whole business 51:28 What Michael's role at the company is today 52:40 Warren Buffett calls Bitcoin rat poison. Is he right? 1:01:30 How employees feel working at Mic...

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About Michael Saylor

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), has continued to advocate for Bitcoin as a digital capital asset and has promoted the company's digital credit instrument, STRC (Stretch). In multiple interviews and conference appearances in 2025 and 2026, Saylor described Bitcoin's recent price decline from around $125,000 to $60,000 as a "classic bear market" and stated he believed the asset had found a bottom. He argued that Bitcoin's fundamentals have improved over the past two years, citing regulatory support, the approval of spot ETFs, and growing institutional adoption. Saylor said that Bitcoin's long-term value could reach $7 million per coin, based on his view that it could eventually represent a significant share of global capital. Saylor faced criticism from some Bitcoin proponents after Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin in 2026, which he characterized as a minor transaction relative to the company's total holdings of over 250,000 Bitcoin purchased that year. He stated that the "never sell your Bitcoin" advice was intended for individual retail investors, not for a publicly traded company with fiduciary duties. Saylor described Strategy's business model as one of selling digital credit backed by Bitcoin, and he said the company's STRC instrument, which pays an 11.5% tax-deferred dividend, was designed to attract capital from traditional credit markets. He argued that integrating Bitcoin with credit markets was necessary for the asset to grow and that critics who rejected such financial instruments were "Twitter trolls" rather than Bitcoin maximalists.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Michael Saylor's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (147 segments)

Interviewer0:00

For everyone. 7.8 billion people for 100 million companies for everyone with money on earth or everyone that earns a salary on earth. This is the big idea of the podcast. You have to

What's up everybody? We got a special guest in the house. Michael Saylor. Have you heard the nickname they give you on YouTube? The gigachad. Have you seen this one? So, Michael, go ahead. I was going to ask you, have you heard this nickname that they gave Michael Saylor? The crypto community, you know, sort of give it and take it away. They are extremely passionate and devoted, but they are also just nuts online. My Twitter mentions are unusable now. I'm sure Michael's are the same just because of that group, but they are funny also. So they nicknamed him the gigachad because he is probably the most credible established person and company with MicroStrategy to adopt Bitcoin in a major way and really is driving the institutional pickup of it. So if you're listening to this and you never heard of Michael Saylor, the reason to listen is he's a pretty interesting guy. Had a really interesting career. But most notably, he is known for using his company MicroStrategy and buying about $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, or they own $2 billion worth of Bitcoin. Bought about, I don't know how much you guys put in, half a billion or a billion.

Michael Saylor1:40

No. We bought 2.2 billion worth of Bitcoin. We own about five, a bit more than five billion, depending upon the day.

Interviewer1:55

Wow.

Michael Saylor1:56

More than five billion in Bitcoin.

Interviewer1:57

Okay. All right. You have a ship behind you, right? Like a huge, what is that? It's an antique handmade model, a 19th century model of a 17th century galleon, like a model to Amsterdam, a galleon that sailed out of Amsterdam in the 17th century and it was made in the 19th century. So it's a very interesting piece. Are you a car guy?

Michael Saylor2:41

I have a bunch of cars, but no, I'm not a car guy.

Interviewer2:44

What's the coolest one you have?

Michael Saylor2:45

I lean toward SUVs. I have a bunch of SUVs. I had a Lexus convertible that I used to love that I drove a lot, but I don't really drive a lot.

Interviewer2:59

So you can give Sam a grade. Sam just sold his company, came into a bunch of money, and he bought what? What did you buy, Sam? Okay, so I was driving it all this weekend and I've been getting made fun of. I can't believe people are making fun of me. Do you know what an AMG station wagon is? Like a Mercedes AMG? Okay, so basically there's Mercedes, which everyone knows, and then there's AMG, which is like a subsidiary, and they basically put race car engines into cars. I bought this. But the problem about fast cars and cool cars is that they're super impractical mostly. I wanted something that was kind of fast and fun to drive, but I wanted to be more practical. There's this thing called an AMG E63 wagon. It's a station wagon. It looks like a mom car except you can put your dog in the back and it has five seats and still goes 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. So I bought a souped up station wagon, one of the fastest cars on the road, but it's a station wagon. That's what I'm driving right now.

Michael Saylor3:56

Works for you. Well, I was looking for someone to geek out on it, but I guess you're not. I for some reason pegged you as a car guy, but I guess I'm wrong.

Interviewer4:06

Michael Saylor4:07

I'm more into boats and planes than cars.

Interviewer4:10

What does that mean if you're into planes?

Michael Saylor4:14

I like aircraft because if an aircraft can go Mach 0.89 or Mach 0.85, you're allowed to legally fly it that fast. Whereas, no, Mach 0.85 would be like 500 knots or something. The point is airplanes can fly at their full speed, and yachts or boats can go at their full speed over the water, but an automobile that could go 60 miles an hour, you don't very often get to do that legally. So I like vehicles that you can operate at their design point legally and safely.

Interviewer5:04

Well, what planes do you have? Feeling as an engineer?

Michael Saylor5:08

I have a Global Express XRS.

Sam5:11

What?

Interviewer5:13

Before we get into Bitcoin stuff, because Sean's been talking about you for like a year now. He was following MicroStrategy and all that, but you own a ton of domain names, right?

Michael Saylor5:30

Yeah, I bought a bunch.

Interviewer5:32

Like how many do you own now?

Michael Saylor5:34

I won't count all. I own hundreds and hundreds, but the ones that are top level primary domain names, about 16. Like words in the English language that everybody understands. I own Emma, Frank, I own my own name, Michael.com. I also own my nickname, Mike.com. So my personal website is on Michael.com. You just type Michael.com, you see all the stuff about me. Hope.

Interviewer6:06

Yes, Sam. Go to hope.com. See where that takes you.

Michael Saylor6:09

Go to hope.com. Yeah. Well, actually, Bitcoin is hope. So if you type hope.com, you'll get everything there is to know about Bitcoin. Because I actually repath hope to all of our Bitcoin resources and materials. I owned voice.com and I sold it for $30 million a couple years ago. That's the largest naked domain sale in the history of domains.

Interviewer6:36

Tell the short version of that story. The story is kind of crazy. I've heard it once before, but I assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You recognized these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There's only one owner of each. You own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. At some point you decide to see if somebody wants to buy some. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick.

Michael Saylor7:09

Well, I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn't it be great to own a part of the English language? Owning hope or owning voice. Eventually there'll be a Google Voice or some telco company that'll want to launch a service. What a great domain to launch on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time. At some point we were looking for joint ventures, looking to commercialize them. We did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called Alarm.com, which is now publicly traded on NASDAQ, a four or five billion dollar market cap company. It integrates your home alarm into the internet. I created another company called Angel.com and sold that for a bit more than a hundred million dollars. That was a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before they came along. I had voice and was holding it, looking for some good commercialization. Someone out of the blue contacted us through a domain broker and said, do you want to sell it? We'll give you $150,000. I said no. A week later they doubled it to $300,000. I said no. A couple days later they went to $600,000. I said no. They said, what should we say? I said, tell them we're not interested, it's got to be something serious. They went to $1.2 million, then $2 million. I said no. They wanted to know what I wanted. I said, it's the word voice in the English language, so it's going to have to be something north of, I don't know, seven or eight figures. I just said a lot of money. They doubled again to $2.5 million, then $5 million, then around $10 million. I had eight people in my office looking at me like, aren't you going to take the money? I said no, send them a note pointing out that this is the word voice in the English language, and it's worth a billion dollars to the right company. They said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, tell them $30 million. I'll take $30 million for it. I thought if I didn't give them a number they would stop negotiating after five nos. So I said $30 million. I didn't want to sell it for $30 million, I wanted to sell it for $100 million or more, but I said $30 million. They upped their offer to $12 million. I said no, but if you want, I'll take a meeting. So when it got to $12 million, I said I'd get on the phone for half an hour. The call started with someone saying, how about $22 million? I said, let me explain. This is like my daughter. I'm willing to marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. I value this domain at $30 million. If you don't want to give me the $30, I'm going to regret after I sell it anyway, but I would do it just to make the market. If you don't want to value it at $30, I'll just keep it. They said, okay, we'll give you $30. I said okay. So we got to $30 from $150,000. They doubled seven or eight times. I didn't really need the money. At that point I had maybe $600 million in cash in the bank and the company was a multi-billion dollar company. A million's not going to move the needle for me. $100,000 is not going to move the needle. $5 million or $10 million is not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there's no point in doing it unless it was something material.

Interviewer12:27

Were the eight people in your office your co-workers?

Michael Saylor12:34

Business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal. It's a big deal, they want to do the deal. The only way you get $30 million is to say no to $22 million.

Interviewer12:51

Any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? You paid nothing for this. Take it. Were you always that way?

Michael Saylor13:12

My view is that the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years. In a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value, just like hope is a valuable word forever. Until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I think people are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that's a misspelling of a normal word. It's like, I got to convince you how to sell with two Y's and a Z. Why would you do that? In the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, your iPhone unspells it for you. So try going to a website that's a misspelling of a name. Most brand consultants, I disagree with them all. They charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word, then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be to buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you have to pay a hundred million or $200 million or $500 million, because if I see your ad and you tell me your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. I always view domains as being undervalued. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars on crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can't spell and can't remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they're not there yet. I didn't want to sell it, to tell you the truth. If you owned the word angel or alarm or hope or voice, Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. If they're going to try to launch a voice service, it's worth it to them. Eventually, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google are just going to keep generating more money. But the word voice or hope or any positive, easy to spell, short word in the English language is going to be an awesome place to build a brand.

Interviewer15:55

So right now it looks like you own or you owned strategywisdom.com, Alarm.com, Angel.com, alertcourage.com, mike.com, voice.com, usher.com, hopespeaker.com, Michael, Mike, Saylor.org. So you own a bunch of them.

Michael Saylor16:14

Yeah. My view is like trying to sell, I got 20 Picassos and I wanted the world to value Picassos. So I sell the first one for $30 million, but the next one I want $100 million for, or I really want someone to create a billion dollar business with me on that. That's the right way to think of it. How many people have learned to speak English on earth? Two billion maybe. How many years of your life do you spend learning English? A typical person spends 10 years from kindergarten through 12th grade. Let's say four years. Two billion people spend four years, that's eight billion years of time spent figuring out how to spell and type your brand. If you value the eight billion years at $20 an hour, that's $160 billion worth of money spent teaching people that hope is a good thing. What's it worth to have a brand which is universally understood and easy to spell, burned into the head of billions of people? You couldn't go buy advertising to convince them that H-O-P is a good thing. They're just good investments. They're scarce real estate in cyberspace and they'll always be good. The world undervalues them. When I tell you Alarm.com, you can remember alarm. You can go type alarm when you get off this podcast. Anybody that wants to check out what Alarm.com does doesn't have to look it up and sort through 197,000 Google search pages to figure out which one is the one that Saylor was talking about.

Interviewer18:32

My friend started Calm.com, the meditation app. The first thing he did was get the domain. He decided early on, I'm going to build a brand around the feeling of being calm. It took the form of a meditation app. He decided up front what it was going to be and got that domain. He had to negotiate to get it. These domain negotiations go prolonged, but definitely another success story of that path.

Michael Saylor18:59

I'll remember it too. You just pitched me on an idea. I'll get off this podcast and if four weeks from now someone asks me, what was that meditation business thing? I'll be like, call m.com, right?

Interviewer19:20

Hopefully they got the right spelling of it. No, there's three L's. I'm just joking. It's the right one. All right, let's talk about something else. You've been in the game for a while. How long have you been the CEO of MicroStrategy? 30 years almost?

Michael Saylor19:38

Since 1989. So 31 years. I've been the public company CEO since 1998.

Interviewer19:44

I think Sam was born in 1989.

Michael Saylor19:46

Publicly traded company CEO.

Interviewer19:49

You've been a publicly traded company CEO longer than I've been alive. And you've had some ups and downs. I saw an interview of you on Charlie Rose. You were looking like Tom Cruise. You go on Charlie Rose and you're flying high. You're a 34 year old guy who took the company public. MicroStrategy was worth $11 billion or something at that point. And best of all, you owned half of it or maybe a little more. So you're a 34-year-old billionaire. A few years later, the stock price crashed pretty dramatically. There are two remarkable things. A, I want to hear what it was like to be in that position and then face that crash. And B, how did you keep your job? Was it because you owned a controlling stake? Most CEOs cannot survive a stock price crash from $300 something a share to under 50 cents a share. How did that happen?

Michael Saylor20:46

If you're in business long enough, you're going to have setbacks. You can't let the setbacks crush your spirit or cause you to stop thinking and innovating and growing. They're humbling.

Interviewer21:03

We all know that's the right answer. Setbacks happen, you got to pick yourself up. But when it does happen, do you remember what that felt like? What the day was like when you were experiencing the crash? What were you thinking as it was happening?

Michael Saylor21:24

It's not pleasant. It's not pleasant, but you have to move on. You have to focus. You have responsibilities.

Interviewer21:36

You were talking about when you were selling that domain name. How many years ago was that? Two years ago, maybe. So not that long ago. But you were saying you had $600 million in cash, the company was doing great. Why continue as CEO when Bitcoin seems like one of your main focuses next to MicroStrategy? Why not focus entirely on that instead of running this business?

Michael Saylor22:10

First of all, the business has two strategies. The first strategy is we sell business intelligence software to our customers. The second strategy is we acquire and hold Bitcoin. That is the business. If you look at what we've done, we bought $250 million worth of Bitcoin that we had generated as a publicly traded company. Without the business, we couldn't have bought the first $250 million of Bitcoin. That required an intricate set of due diligence and disclosures. Then we did a Dutch tender offer, basically an equity offering. We did a reverse Dutch auction and bought another $175 million worth of Bitcoin. That's another thing you have to be a public company to do. Then we swept our cash flows as a public company into Bitcoin, bought $50 million more. Without the company, couldn't have done it. Then we did a convertible debt offering for $650 million of debt at 75 basis points. Without being a public company, we couldn't have done that either. We bought Bitcoin, it went up, we bought some more with cash flow, then we did a billion dollar debt offering at 0% interest. You couldn't have done that without being a public company. There are benefits to being a public company. Public companies are credible, they're the gold standard as a counterparty. There are 100 million companies in the world, only about 4,000 publicly traded on US exchanges. It's very rare. You have to go through a huge amount of compliance. We file 10-Qs, 10-Ks. We have a lot of compliance architecture, security architecture. I'm signing Sarbanes-Oxley statements every quarter. We're responsible for FCPA, etc. That gives investors comfort with a publicly traded company. The most important thing to take away from the podcast is Bitcoin is an exploding asset class. It's the greatest treasury reserve asset of our lifetimes and the solution to every company's treasury problem. If you have a corporation that has capital or generates cash flow, you can immediately double or improve the value of the company simply by changing your treasury policy.

Interviewer23:27

Got it. And

Michael Saylor23:28

If you take a company with cash and invest in Bitcoin, you've converted a liability to an asset. I was enhancing the value of the company by pursuing the Bitcoin strategy. They go together. They're synergistic.

Interviewer23:48

Let's lay out the context for people who don't know how it all played out. In our audience, we're going to get about 300,000 to 400,000 listeners this month. Probably 5% are as crazy about Bitcoin as me and have put a huge chunk of their net worth into Bitcoin. 50% are curious, 50% are novices. MicroStrategy is a couple billion dollar public company, been around for a while, has a good track record, sells enterprise software, generates a ton of cash. You have about $500-600 million of cash in your treasury. You're looking for something to do with it. At some point you realize you have this treasury problem. All companies have this treasury problem whether they are aware of it or not. Can you describe the treasury problem you experienced at a $500 million level? Anybody with $500,000 or $100,000 in the bank has the same fundamental problem. Explain the treasury problem as you saw it a year ago.

Michael Saylor25:03

The treasury problem is that subsequent to March 2020, the cost of capital exploded from 8% to 25%. You can see that in the performance of the S&P 500 index, which went from about 8% a year for a decade to more than 25% in that next year. That means anybody investing money on behalf of a limited partner or any other investor has to generate that cost of capital to avoid destroying wealth. If you generated less than an 8% yield for the decade from 2010 to 2020 as a financial adviser, you destroyed wealth because the alternative was just to buy the SPY index. If you generated less than 25% from March 2020 onward, you destroyed wealth because you could have made 25% just by owning the index. The treasury problem is that when the cost of capital is zero, by the way, the cost of capital is being driven by the expansion of the money supply. The Federal Reserve is expanding the M2 money supply by about 5 to 6% a year for that decade. When you tack on the risk premium, you get to your 8% S&P return. When the Federal Reserve expands the M2 money supply by 20 to 25%, that's where you get that explosion in the cost of capital. The inflation doesn't show up in consumer goods. The inflation immediately shows up in assets. We have asset inflation. Within minutes of when the central bank decides to stimulate the economy, the price of all assets explodes. The problem for every company, all 100 million companies in the world, every private company, every public company, is you have capital in your treasury and that capital has to yield the cost of capital. If it doesn't, you're destroying shareholder value. Another way to say it is if you generate cash and put it into the bank account to pay zero interest, and if the cost of everything you want to buy goes up by 10% a year, in seven years you'll only be able to buy half as much. You've lost half the value of your savings. When that discount rate or cost of capital doubles, in three and a half years you've lost half your money. At a 25% cost of capital, in three years you've lost half your wealth. The treasury problem is the cost of capital has exploded. As it goes through the roof, every company is in a quandary. They either have to decapitalize and give all their assets back to shareholders because they can't meet the cost of capital, or they are under extreme political pressure from shareholders. Everybody's beating you up as CEO saying, what are you doing with all that cash? You should pay a dividend or buy the stock back. The second pressure is if you run a company and your cash flows are growing at 8% a year but the cost of capital is 25% a year, I'm discounting you at a rate higher than your growth rate. The value of your stock is going to be forecast to go to zero. You can't hold value in a company growing at 5% a year when the cost of capital is 25% a year. That's why the only thing you can buy is a high tech stock that's growing. You need to buy a tech monopoly that can grow 20 or 25% a year. If you come to me with a business idea for a company that makes a lot of cash but is growing 2% or 1% a year, I'm not interested in a high cost of capital environment. The problem we faced in March is what do we do? Give all the money back to the shareholders or can we find something to invest in that's going to generate more than 25% return? That puts us to a question. What we did in essence was split the difference. In an ideal situation, you would just buy $500 million worth of Bitcoin and put out a press release. But if you did that, it would be such a shock to outside shareholders that the fear would be someone would sue us or dump the stock because you were so aggressive and they'd claim you took a risk you didn't disclose. So our response was to disclose to everybody that we're about to take a risk, and after that, go ahead and take the risk, but at the same time give everybody an insurance policy. We offered to buy back $250 million worth of the stock in a Dutch auction. If you disagree with the decision to buy Bitcoin, you can sell the stock back at a profit. Our stock was $120. We offered to buy the stock back at up to $140. We cushioned the blow of the investment strategy by giving people an exit strategy from the equity. That rotated the shareholder base, and then we began to pursue the Bitcoin strategy as a primary treasury reserve asset with a different shareholder base.

Interviewer33:28

So let me ask you a question. I like the analogy that we have this giant bowl of ice cream that's melting. That's your cash pile melting. The heat is the money printer causing asset inflation.

Michael Saylor33:43

Ice cube that's melting. We have a $500 million ice cube and it's melting 20% a year. It'll be gone in.

Interviewer33:51

So you needed to do something with that. You didn't want it to all melt away. A couple quick questions. In 20 years from now, what do you think has generated more value or more income to MicroStrategy? The operating income or the investment income from the Bitcoin it holds?

Michael Saylor34:15

The investment income for sure.

Interviewer34:17

Okay. And then

Michael Saylor34:19

To be very clear, what happened in March 2020 is when the cost of capital goes to 25%. That means every investor generated 25% more doing nothing. And every main street company that worked 25% harder got nothing. You literally tilt the playing field so that if you own assets, you're having the best year in 30 years. If you don't own assets, it's impossible to have a good year.

Interviewer34:56

Right. So the second question is, as you acquire more and more Bitcoin, is MicroStrategy positioned like a Bitcoin ETF? Buy this Bitcoin buying and holding company.

Michael Saylor35:16

It's not a Bitcoin ETF. Everybody is sloppy with those words. An ETF is a company that invests in securities and tries to keep its assets under management equal to the amount of shares of ETF it sold. It's a financial company. An ETP is a similar type of company that invests in commodities. If you create a Bitcoin entity that equalizes assets under management equal to the shares you sell, you created a Bitcoin ETP. We're neither of those things. We're not a finance company. We're not an ETF. We're not an ETP. We're not equitizing or selling Bitcoin to equalize assets under management. We're an operating company that owns property. Bitcoin is property. You should think of it as a company that bought a million acres of land in Texas or a million gallons of something, a million bushels of soybeans. You can buy any kind of property and hold it on your balance sheet as a company. That's what we are. Now, what's your question? You were talking about the cost of capital being 25% because since March that's what the S&P 500 has done. But the stock market goes up and down. The average over time is 7 or 8% geometric mean. Some would argue that this year assets inflated by that much, but that doesn't mean next year it will remain at 25%. You have to make some prediction. Are you forecasting it at 25%, 15%, 10%, 8%? Does the decision change at a certain number?

Interviewer37:09

Michael Saylor37:11

For the decade from 2010 to 2020, it was generally about 8%, pretty consistent. The single biggest driver of cost of capital is the rate at which the broad money supply expands. If you Google M2 money supply Fed, you'll get a chart. The chart is not all over the place. It's very consistent, a 7% slope for a decade. It's not jerking around. It was very consistent monetary policy for a decade. Then that chart goes straight up 24%. If you're going to make a decision as an investor, and this applies to all $400 trillion worth of investors and every company on earth, you have to estimate the rate at which the money supply will expand each year for the next eight years. That's the single most important thing in the world for everyone, for 7.8 billion people, for 100 million companies, for everyone with money on earth or everyone that earns a salary on earth. This is the big idea of the podcast. You have to estimate the rate at which the currency is going to expand. If you believe the currency is going to continue to expand at 15% a year for the next eight years, you come to one conclusion. If you plug in 10%, it's a different conclusion. If it's 25%, it's a different conclusion. What do I think? I think 15% for the next eight years is reasonable. If you're a pessimist, you could say 20. If you're an optimist, you could say 10. The money supply is expanding because the Federal Reserve and the EU Central Bank are buying a trillion dollars worth of bonds every year each. It's also expanding because the governments of the EU and the US are running multi-trillion dollar deficits. It is also expanding because of trillion dollar plus stimulus. There's no reason to think that's going to change in the next four years, and I don't think in the next eight years. At the point that the Democrats took control of the Senate and the House, you could have forecasted 12% inflation if it was a split government. But in a non-split government, there seems to be remarkable consensus that we should run deficits, continue to keep interest rates low, and continue to stimulate the economy. What does that mean? If you plug in a number 15%, it means the risk-free return is 15%. You have to generate in excess of 15% on your money every year for the next four years to stay ahead of the rate of asset inflation. A reasonable person would say the assets are going to inflate at that rate. That means if your company is not growing its cash flows at a 20% rate, it's not going to hold value as a stock. If your bond is paying you an interest rate of less than 15%, you're destroying value in the bond. If your rent yield is less than 15%, your commercial real estate is destroying value. If you're holding cash, you're losing 15% of it a year. That's the negative real yield. Once you embrace the idea of asset inflation, and asset inflation equals cost of capital equals the rate of money supply expansion, then you realize there's a negative real yield on everything except for Bitcoin for the most part. The negative real yield on gold is 3% (the rate at which we mine it or hypothecate it). The negative real yield on sovereign debt is about 12-13%. The negative real yield on corporate debt is 10%. Every company with a growth rate of less than 15% has a negative real yield. Once you do that, you realize you can't really have a business strategy as a company unless you find a way to solve the treasury problem. The big idea is you want to fix any company: sweep all the cash flows into Bitcoin, convert the treasury into Bitcoin, borrow against your future cash flows in dollars, convert that into Bitcoin, finance all your fixed assets in dollars, convert that into Bitcoin, and issue equity as much as you can now at the highest valuation in dollars and invest in Bitcoin. Why Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin is the apex property. It's the most scarce monetary asset in the universe. You can't make any more of it. It's encrypted money. That means it's least likely to be impaired by property tax, execution issues, money printing, dilution, counterparty risk, and corruption. We have engineered a superior asset, a thermodynamically sound, technically superior asset. It's placed on a global digital monetary network which is an open protocol. The combination of the apex asset on the open monetary system makes it the most disruptive technology in the world.

Interviewer43:50

When you were first starting MicroStrategy, you were in the weeds. You were thinking, I have to make a product that solves a problem and make money off of it. Right now, you've gone way up the hierarchy of needs. Now you can do whatever you want. At what point did you notice a shift? Like, oh my gosh, this business is stable, it's working, it's quite predictable. At what point did that shift happen? Because what you're talking about now is quite foreign to what you were doing.

Michael Saylor44:22

I think we solved our problem when we actually embraced Bitcoin. I could say to you, oh yeah, when I had $500 million cash in the bank and we were focused, but the problem with that is if you have a bunch of cash generating zero interest and the cost of capital goes to 25%, then all the public company investors forsake the company. If the stock market forsakes the company, then mainstream media forsakes the company. Then the employees become dejected because eventually Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Google will steal every one of your employees if you can't drive the stock up. Nobody wants to invest in a company that makes a lot of money growing at 5% a year. It seems brutal to say that, but it wouldn't be true if the cost of capital was zero. If we had a sound money policy in this country, you could hold your head up high and say, I run this great restaurant, we made a lot of money last year, we're going to make a lot of money this year, and our plan is to keep doing what we've been doing. Everybody would pat you on the back and say that's good, that's honorable. But if I tell you I'm going to devalue the cash by 25% a year or 20% a year, at some point you're driven into a cycle where you have to either do a big acquisition to keep revenues growing, take extreme risk and do dilutive acquisitions, or borrow billions of dollars to buy the stock back to leverage up cash flow per share. If you don't do any of those things, the investors dump the stock. If they dump the stock, the employees start feeling like, why don't they go work someplace cool and hot, and you're going to get all your engineers stripped away by Facebook or Amazon. The truth is, when we fixed the balance sheet, we fixed the stock. At this point, the company has more than $5 billion in assets. If the cost of capital remains at, let's say, 20% (if we print 20% more money next year), I can reasonably expect to generate a billion dollars of investment income, which would be a 20% increase in Bitcoin. But I can reasonably expect better than that. If the cost of capital is 10%, I can reasonably expect $500 million investment income. All 2,000 people doing 100,000 things right perfectly for the entire year competing against Microsoft, which has more money than God, can generate $75 million a year. So the truth is, the company's future became secure when we converted the balance sheet to Bitcoin, because now we don't have to struggle. I don't think any company could be successful without a financial strategy in the year 2021. I wouldn't have said that three or four years ago. If you have a sound money macroeconomic environment where the money supply is expanding at 2 or 3% a year, you can go out and make things, create things, market things, sell things, service things, and generate cash. That makes sense. But if the money supply is expanding at 20% a year, you need to own assets because no one is going to invest in any project that doesn't generate more than the 20% hurdle rate. Who can generate consistently risk-free 20% returns? You have to be a monopoly, a digital monopoly or some kind of monopoly. It becomes exponentially harder to grow. What happens next? All these other companies get squeezed out of the ecosystem. They get decapitalized and rendered insolvent by the monetary policy. If I can get my stock up, then I can make my shareholders happy, change the narrative, recruit, retain talent, inspire confidence in my customers, drive momentum, and then we can do what we want to do. It's similar to a university with no endowment versus one with a billion dollar endowment or a hundred billion dollar endowment. If you're a professor, which university do you want to work for? If you're a student, where do you want to go? Do you have a shiny building coming or not? At the end of the day, money is a measure of energy. If you have monetary assets, you have energy. If you have high energy, you can pursue your vision with integrity.

Interviewer50:04

What percentage of your time now are you spending on investing the income versus on the day-to-day of MicroStrategy, the business as usual, making business intelligence products?

Michael Saylor50:24

I'm the CEO, but we have a president, Fong Lee, who has day-to-day operational responsibility for sales, marketing, and even

Technology development at this point. So, I'm the chairman and the CEO. I oversee the company strategy and I oversee the financial strategies. I oversee long-term direction and I oversee technology strategy, but I'm not in the weeds in the day-to-day running the business. That's really left for the operating executive team.

Interviewer50:59

So, about a year ago, I tweeted out that I had moved 25% of my net worth into Bitcoin, which has now become like I don't know 50 plus percent almost. And a friend called me, our friend who comes on this podcast, his name's Andrew Wilkinson, very successful business guy. He's got a public company in Canada now. He sort of owns businesses that are worth about over a billion dollars. And he called me and he was just like, 'Hey, I just want to make sure you know what you're doing here.' And you know, like a concerned friend and he comes from like kind of the Warren Buffett, you know, he's a Warren Buffett disciple. And famously Buffett and Munger, you know, Charlie Munger called Bitcoin rat poison and then Buffett called it rat poison squared. And so you get really intelligent people who are well respected for what they've done talking about Bitcoin. So first, what's your reaction to the Buffett opinion on Bitcoin?

Michael Saylor51:56

I think everybody's captured by their frame of reference. Warren Buffett, would you agree that Warren Buffett for the most part made money investing in stocks?

Interviewer52:07

Yeah, in nontechnology stocks primarily.

Michael Saylor52:09

And maybe overseeing operating companies. How successful would he have been if he did that in Nigeria or let's say Zimbabwe or Argentina for the past 15 years or Venezuela?

Interviewer52:23

Not very well.

Michael Saylor52:24

That strategy wouldn't have worked right. For example, there is no strategy that would work if you were a business person in Zimbabwe when the currency collapsed. And if you look at the Argentine blue dollar, the Argentine peso actually used to be worth a dollar and then it was three pesos to the dollar. Today on the black market, they call it the blue market, it's worth about 150 pesos to the dollar. There's, you know, if you live in a world where you just, let's just start by assuming the currency is strong and we have no problem with that and that stocks are going to work and then let's talk about our investment strategy. Well, if you live in that world and you can make those assumptions, great. But what if the currency weakens at 15% a year for the next decade? Then your strategy doesn't work. So I think that for the most part the world's full of successful people, but there's two things they're missing. One, they're assuming optimistically that in the United States and Western Europe whatever currency challenges we have, whatever weakness of the currency we have will be rapidly rectified. They're either in denial like here's how you'll know. Ask someone that's an investor how they did last year. If they're honest, they'll say, 'Oh, all my, you know, the dollar crashed and all my stocks are up 20 to 50% because the dollar's weaker.' And if they tell you, 'Oh, I had a great year. All my portfolio is up 37% or 50% because I'm a genius stock picker.' Right? That's how you interpret the world. Is the dollar weakening or is the market getting better? Right? And so there's a lot of people that have been successful in their frame of reference and so they just attribute the virtuous activity of their virtuous stockpicking or their virtuous business strategy for their success. Right? And then they wonder why everybody else can't be like them.

Interviewer54:39

Right.

Michael Saylor54:39

Right. And then I think the second part of this is Bitcoin is a paradigm shift. It's the first time in the history of the human race that we managed to put first layer money on a digital network. You I mean there is nothing to study. Someone that's telling you they've studied this. How could you have studied it? It's like we invented fire or we invented electricity. It's such a new invention that if your friend said I spent 47 hours studying Bitcoin, right, and I have the following detail concerns about how it's going to evolve as a dominant digital asset network and these are the things I'm worried about. Maybe would have been constructive conversation, but I think that most people don't even understand yet that it's a digital monetary network. They don't even know there's a class of such a thing. It's the first such thing in the history of the human race. So, I've created the ability to manifest property in cyberspace using strong encryption and I have decentralized that network such that no company or no CEO or no country can be a point of failure. Right? This is a first in the human race that you know this is a fire in cyberspace that's burning with a trillion dollars of energy. It's the fastest growth to a trillion dollars of any digital network in the history of the world 12 years. And so if you embrace that and you say, 'Okay, I've got two things going on here. I have a macro I've this is the first time in 30 years that the money supply, the broad money supply in the US and Europe is all linked and all collapsing at a rate north of 20%.' We didn't have this, not in your lifetime, not in my lifetime. The last time we got something similar, this is 1980, but and before in the 70s. But in the 70s, you had a bunch of different central banks. The German bank, the French bank, the US bank. The US was not the world currency. It was like 30% of the currency trades in the 1980s. It wasn't 90%. So we had the formation of the EU. The EU tied all of European currency to the dollar. That became 90% of all the currency. Every other central bank tied in the dollar. So we arrive in a period in the last 12 months where the behavior of the US Fed and the expansion of the M2 money supply is in essence weakening every currency on earth at the same time. You've only got three sets of currencies. You've got the strong currencies weakening at the same rate as the dollar. That's like 20 rich countries. Then you've got most currencies weakening 20 to 40% more against the dollar and then you've got the last basket of currencies weakening 80% or more against the dollar. They're utterly collapsing. And so you have a macroeconomic circumstance we've never seen in our lifetime. And then you have a technology, the most disruptive technology of our life, more disruptive than Google, than Facebook, more disruptive than YouTube, more disruptive than Zoom, more disruptive than the iPhone. It took Google 22 years to get to a trillion. It took Amazon 24 years to get to a trillion. It took Apple 42 years to get to a trillion. It took Microsoft 44 years to get to a trillion. It took Bitcoin 12. It's a monetary fire. It's burning in cyberspace. And these two things together, you know, by the way, how do you feed a monetary fire with money?

Interviewer58:51

More money than ever. The money is feeding the fire, right? And anybody living in a comfortable environment with a business strategy that worked last year, right? They're going to be late to understand this because they haven't had this jarring realization that there's something fundamentally different. By the way, if you lived in Argentina or you lived in Lebanon and your currency, like let's take Lebanon collapses overnight by 80%. And if someone handed you an iPhone and said you can put Bitcoin on this and you won't be broke and starving tomorrow, you would have an incentive to learn about this new technology because your entire world crashed around your head. But if you're living in a world where you think you just made 30% return on your portfolio, you don't quite have the same appreciation of the problem.

Yeah. Go ahead, Sam. So you it almost is it's almost like rooted in the decision to do all of this is definitely shareholder stuff, shareholder value, but a lot of it was like rooted like well I just want to attract great talent. Or that was definitely a factor. How has how many people work there now? 2,000

Sam1:00:11

2,000 how has this impacted your ability to recruit and retain people?

Michael Saylor1:00:17

It's been great for retention and it's been great for recruiting. We can get people first of all the company's brand has been amped up by a factor of a thousand. I mean a lot more people know us now and

Interviewer1:00:30

Like what's the culture like now? Is that different?

Michael Saylor1:00:33

Just more just happy. Bitcoin is hope. Okay. So let me say it a different way. If your family has $100,000 and you showed up, you know, today and I told you it was in a bank in Lebanon and now it's 20,000, but you can't spend it and it's going to zero.

Interviewer1:00:53

What's your family's morale?

Michael Saylor1:00:56

Right? Well, death. And if your family had $100,000 in Bitcoin at the same in the same year and I told you, 'Oh, by the way, Bitcoin's up by a thousand percent and now you have a million dollars and it's probably going to keep going up forever and you don't have to worry about'

Sam1:01:11

It's not black and white like that. It's not black and white.

Michael Saylor1:01:14

It is black and white.

Sam1:01:14

No, it's not. I'm looking at your glass door reviews. I'm looking at the glass door reviews. Not everyone agrees. Like surely there's downside to this. I mean, not everyone agrees. I'm looking at I see a lot of bad reviews and every great company has a lot of bad reviews, but it's not black and white that everyone agrees. I mean, you have a 43% review on Glass Door. I know that Glass Door isn't the full picture, but it's clear that not everyone agrees with your opinion.

Michael Saylor1:01:36

And I want to know,

Sam1:01:37

Is that only stats for the past six months?

Michael Saylor1:01:42

No. No. There's a thousand reviews and it's been up there,

Sam1:01:46

Isn't it? For the past decade.

Michael Saylor1:01:48

Um, but I can sort by date. So I can tell you a number by any constraint. Right now it's all so 10,000 reviews and it's a low review. And so it doesn't seem that everyone agrees with you.

Interviewer1:02:05

Are you looking at the past 10 years and if you go back over the past 10 years we had one point where the company was contracting and we laid off employees and so

Sam1:02:17

No I'm looking at reviews all from 2020. There's

Michael Saylor1:02:20

Truth be told. No, nobody gives a [__] about glass door reviews, right? Like you know that's

Sam1:02:23

I do.

Michael Saylor1:02:26

I think that there's two no matter how thin the pancake, there's always two sides, but there's bits of truth in all of it, right? You could gain what is the point you would like to make and what shall we discuss?

Sam1:02:40

What I want to know is what's been the downside of this because it's not black and white that everyone agrees with you. It's not black and white that this has been perfect.

Interviewer1:02:50

Sam, can I ask you a question in a slightly different way? I think I get what you're trying to say. So, it's not necessarily, oh, have people disagreed with you because right now also you look like a genius. You bought the thing, the brand is up, the stock is up, the Bitcoin price is up. Like, if you really disagree now, this is your own personal problem at this point. Strategy has clearly worked up till now. The question is more that hey, we've had periods of time. I've been holding Bitcoin since 2013 2014 and I've seen Bitcoin go down, you know, 70 80% draw downs and you have basically taken out a bunch of debt. You bought Bitcoin. You own $5 billion of Bitcoin. The majority of the company's value is the Bitcoin that it owns. And if we do see I think we kind of agree volatility will dampen over time, but that doesn't mean we can't see a draw down like that again. What happens when Bitcoin price drops by 50% again? What's your reaction to that? How does that affect your strategy or what's your overall viewpoint of this possibility that

Michael Saylor1:03:48

That's not that's not

Sam1:03:50

The downside of your strategy? Right.

Michael Saylor1:03:52

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On a day-to-day level at the company, it sounds I imagine there's a ton of people that love this, but what has been any of the downsides of this? Because with every great decision, there's always going to be downsides as well as upsides. I can't see any downside for the employees. They've all benefited. I can't see any downside for the investors that stayed with us. They've all benefited, right? I mean, there are critics out there that don't like Bitcoin. And by the way, there are people that will say, 'You're a CEO. You shouldn't invest it.' There are people that will say operating companies shouldn't have assets, right? There's criticism. People say, 'Well, you're a CEO. You should go back to your cubicle and write software and leave the investing to the professionals.' But I think that the fundamental elephant in the room here is that the macroeconomic environment is so incredibly unfair to people without assets. Like literally, if you're an operating company or a main street company, you have to work 30% harder to stand still. And if you're a Wall Street company, you can stand still and get 30% more. Like the playing field is so tilted in favor of property owners or asset holders against manufacturers and companies that do things that you can't really be successful in business unless you have assets as part of your strategy.

Interviewer1:05:30

And so okay, so me and Sam were asking different questions. Sam wanted to know more about the morale. I want to know if we do see another Bitcoin crash draw down 50% 60% what happens to your position and what happens to your point of view?

Michael Saylor1:05:47

Well, we have permanent capital, so it doesn't make a difference to us, right? Like right now, for example, we have a $3 billion investment gain. So if you cut Bitcoin in half, we would still have an investment gain, right? I mean, our basis is 24,000. So, if it goes down to less than 24,000 and stays there forever, then it will have not been a good investment, I suppose. But otherwise, we've got a long-term strategy, which is you buy it and hold it. And I think that a lot of people live in fear of volatility, but a lot of people live in fear of a lot of things, right? If you have enough fear, you won't leave your house. You won't do anything. And so, you have to have a bit of courage and conviction. I can give you a thousand reasons why I think it makes sense to invest in Bitcoin. I can't give you any reason why I should be afraid to do a rational thing.

Interviewer1:06:55

So, you know, it doesn't really bother me, right? There's this is a rational strategy. If I had it to do all over again, would I? Of course I would. Right. Ask all the investors that made billions and billions of dollars, you know, over the time frame, right? Of course you would do it again. And I think we're going to have to wrap based on time. So, appreciate you coming on. Do you want to leave anybody with a way to find you, a place to follow, place to take a next step if they, you know, liked what they heard?

Michael Saylor1:07:28

Sure. If you're interested in Bitcoin, Bitcoin is hope. So, go to hope.com. We have lots of information in it. If you want to follow me, I'm michael_saylor on Twitter.

Interviewer1:07:40

How much you think bitcoin.com is worth? Roger Ver owns it now. How much would you be paying for Bitcoin.com?

Michael Saylor1:07:44

I don't know. I wouldn't speculate. You know, I think for most people, a lot of what you're saying, I think, is going to be over their heads that listen to this, to be perfectly honest with you. But I could distill it down into a very simple way of looking at it for anybody that listened to this and they were intrigued but they haven't gone down the rabbit hole yet, which is very simply if guys like Michael Saylor who own public companies that have a ton of money are worried about what they're going to do because their money is melting and they're looking for investment grade the most powerful treasury asset and he's decided it's Bitcoin and you know Square has put some money in, PayPal has put money in. Tesla has put a billion and a half dollars into Bitcoin. It's likely that there are more companies out there and it'll take them 6 months to a year to make this move, but they will take a portion of their treasury reserves and they will move it into Bitcoin. And these are long-term holders. These are not retail day traders that are going to be buying and selling the thing like crazy. So the real simple thing is you can sort of invest into the network. You can buy Bitcoin yourself and you can front-run the institutions that are coming. That was a very simple thesis and very simple takeaway for somebody who's listening to this. If you're a company, you better be thinking about what you're going to do with the cash. If you're an individual person, you should also be thinking about what you're going to do with your cash. And the easy move is that for once you get to front-run the institutions and you get to get in before they all get in whereas typically the retail investor is last. I think that's a reasonable thing to say I agree with it. Another big picture way to say it is there's a hundred trillion dollars of treasury assets that have a negative real yield of minus 10 to minus 15% a year. That means they're destroying $10 trillion a year of value. The solution is convert all of that money into Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a trillion dollar asset. That, you know, people that understand Bitcoin think it's going to grow to become the $10 trillion asset that gold is and then it's going to replace negative yielding sovereign debt and then corporate debt and ultimately it will become the primary Treasury reserve network and Treasury reserve asset. And so if you have a company, if you're an investor, it makes sense to buy it because it's got a brilliant future and it solves a problem that everybody on earth has. And if you're a company, it makes sense to plug your treasury into Bitcoin because the road to success is working exponentially harder for currency growing exponentially weaker, right? You're just going to work yourself to death. You know, put yourself in a position of working as hard as you can in Venezuela or Argentina or Zimbabwe and roll the clock forward a decade and ask yourself the question, what do you wish you did? And the answer is protect your assets. Protect your monetary energy, your treasury by putting it into a scarce asset in a bank in cyberspace where no one can steal it, debase it, or destroy it. And that's the Bitcoin ethos. We're simply trying to make it worthwhile to do the other stuff. There's no point in doing a hundred million other things if at the end of the journey you've got nothing to show for it.

Interviewer1:11:12

Yeah. Why create all the value if you cannot store it? So here's a better store of value.

Michael Saylor1:11:17

Yeah.

Interviewer1:11:18

But that's the big idea and that's a business strategy for everybody. Small, medium, large, doesn't matter. And you know, I'm just kind of anticipating somebody hears this and they say, 'But we're not Argentina. We're not Venezuela. Do I really need to worry about this?' And what's your answer to that?

Michael Saylor1:11:35

My answer is the single most important thing for you to have in your life is a forecast for the money supply expansion in your country for the next eight years. So I would say that before you invest the next decade of your life doing whatever, stop and study up on macroeconomics and form an opinion about the rate at which your currency is going to lose economic energy and then you can act accordingly. If you think that the currency is going to hold, by the way, the currency has never held it's lost 6% of its value every year forever, right? It's always losing value. You just have to decide for the next decade whether or not the cost of capital is going to be 8, 12, 16 or 20. And once you make that decision, that will inform you with regard to what degree of enthusiasm will you pursue a hard asset strategy. If you think that the currency is going to weaken rapidly, then you would shift and prioritize hard asset strategy and hard asset acquisition aggressively. And if you think that the currency is going to not weaken that rapidly, you would prioritize other strategies, right? And everybody's got to make that decision for themselves. But when you know when Zimbabwe started to crash, normal companies, management consulting companies started buying lumber and coal and oil and anything they could buy because at least you'll still have it tomorrow. Whereas the cash, the currency, the receivables will be worth nothing. So you just have to make that decision. There's plenty of information in the world for you to form your own opinion. Once you formed your opinion, then you can act accordingly.

Interviewer1:13:34

Cool. All right, Michael. Thank you for coming on.

Michael Saylor1:13:37

Yeah, we appreciate this is great. Thank you.

Sam1:13:44

We just did this interview with Michael, what's this? Sailor or S L, right? And no, I mean, I wouldn't sure if it's sailor or sailor without an L.

Interviewer1:13:52

Recap it and then explain your opinion. But first, objectively, try to recap it.

Sam1:13:56

Objectively, we had this guy on, he's objectively successful financially. Objectively a wonderful businessman. He came on for he said ahead of time his objective for this interview was to promote Bitcoin, which that's cool. We could talk about that for a bit. That we I'm down with that. I wanted to ask him a little bit more beyond that, but we didn't get to it. And he talked for 60 plus minutes all about this topic and I personally pressed him on a few topics and he disagreed with me and my vibe. This is all right. We're past the objective part. My vibe from this was I don't trust I don't trust his opinion.

Interviewer1:14:37

Okay. So, I'll give you my two cents and then we'll just talk about it real quick. So, I just was I thought he came on just kind of low energy slash maybe like kind of arrogant. I don't know, smug a little bit. Not in a bad way, but I think at the beginning we were clearly trying to like warm him up, just talk to him about something and he had zero interest in chatting about anything besides the virtues of Bitcoin. And so that was a little bit I don't know just personally a little offputting I guess like I find it more fun when a guest comes on and there's somebody that you leave the podcast being like man I want to I would love to hang with that person more. I think that's a great sign for the guest and I think in this case, you know, I didn't walk away with that feel. I agree with all the things he said objectively. He's super smart. You know, literally a rocket scientist who built a billion dollar company by the, you know, a $10 billion company by the time he was 34. You know, from 24 to 34, he built a $10 billion company, has been running it for 30 years as a public company CEO. Went into Bitcoin heavy and has made $3 billion in Bitcoin. Like, the guy's definitely a smart guy. and I think ahead of the curve in many ways. I've read his book, The Mobile Wave, which he wrote 2012, basically saying that mobile's going to destroy everything. And which in 2012 was a sort of safe prediction, but still a good prediction nonetheless. I don't agree with you that he was dist like what' you say like not trustworthy or something. So explain.

Sam1:16:05

Well, and let me just say this is a knee-jerk reaction. So I don't want my opinion certainly evolving as it's going and I've Sean you've talked about him all the time. So that was my experience to him. I read his Wikipedia page and I probably watched the top two or three interviews. That's my experience. I don't want to say distrusting but there was something about it. So in the interview I questioned him about something silly. Not silly. I don't think it's silly. Sean thinks it's silly and that's okay. I understand why someone thinks that. I said your glass door reviews are pretty shitty like recently.

Interviewer1:16:38

Well, no, you asked more reasonable question. You said it's all been okay, great, Bitcoin's up. This is your stock price is up, but like what have been the downsides, which I think is a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

Sam1:16:48

And he was just like, well, there are no downsides. And I was like, well, that's objectively false because there's some people they could they're anonymous and it's glass door, so that doesn't hold a ton of weight, but there's a lot of people in your reviews that say that this is crazy and that your products are failing and you're doing this to distract that. Like what are the downsides? And he I think he kind of dodged the question and I couldn't get the truth out of him. And because of that, I'm like if I can't trust something so obvious or if someone can't give me a straight answer on something I feel is so obvious of saying like, 'Yeah, look, there's a ton of upside, which I've discussed, but here's some of the downsides, then in my head I'm like, well, I can I believe anything you're saying?'

Interviewer1:17:29

Right? Once you are not reasonable or rational about one thing, I can't fully think you're reasonable and rational about this other thing that you're telling me about. That's kind of what you're saying. How you do anything is how you do everything.

Sam1:17:43

And I also think that anyone who brags about how rational they are are some of the least rational people. I don't

Interviewer1:17:50

Which by the way, I don't think he bragged about it. I think it's like when you ask him, you know, this person says this bad thing about it. He's like, well, I just think it's a clear because of this, this is true. That's a rational thing in my opinion. I don't think he was saying

Sam1:18:03

Yeah, he never claimed he never said that. Correct. But he said like, well, this is an incredibly rational decision. I don't see downsides. And I'm like, well, we're naturally not rational. I'll defend his

Interviewer1:18:14

I'll defend I by the way I spent most of the podcast basically even though I'm a huge Bitcoin bull I spent most podcast bringing up things that a critic of his strategy and a critic of Bitcoin would say just cuz I wanted to hear his answers but in general like I get what he's saying that look we bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin it's gained three billion more stock price is up I don't know 4x since we made this strategy change and you're asking me like how do my employees feel They feel great. Our brand just went up a thousandx. People know what Micro Strategy is now. They didn't know what the hell it was before. Our stock price is up. Our assets are have we've gained a lot more value in our assets. So, what are you talking? He was basically like there's no downside. That's all upside. So, I get that. But he didn't give you the inch that I think most reasonably people would do, which is to say that yeah, everything has its trade-offs. Maybe like it he could have said it was really complicated to go through the process of being the first public company to make this huge Bitcoin purchase and so that was a huge just you know regulatory and legal mess we had to walk work through but I'm glad we did or like you know there's always some people in the company that disagree with the decision and so they you know they haven't you know they're no longer with us or you know they've had to get on board with something that they didn't see as was the right decision and that's always tough whenever you have strong-minded people you're not all going to 100% agree with a radical strategy. He could have said any of those things. He didn't. But that doesn't make me personally distrust him. I think for you that was a turnoff.

Sam1:19:48

I don't want to I like I said before, this is all knee-jerk. It just happened. I want to be careful in my words. If I said distrust, I actually I take that back. I don't entirely mean distrust, but I mean that there's

Interviewer1:20:00

Something going on that I had this gut feeling that

Sam1:20:05

I can't just believe what you're saying and I want to go and this should be the case all the time. I want to go on my own,

Interviewer1:20:12

Right? I think it's all pretty above board, which is that he's basically bet his entire company on Bitcoin. Now they own five billion dollars of Bitcoin. Companies worth $7 billion and Bitcoin, you know, so obviously and he his objective, his stated objective to us coming on was to communicate the nature and virtues of Bitcoin to the audience and leave them excited about the opportunities that Bitcoin offers. So he wasn't there was no bait and switch. He said what he wanted to do. He tried to do that. And it's clear that he is incentivized for more people, companies and individuals to buy Bitcoin because he is maybe the largest holder of Bitcoin in the world. I don't know what I don't know what Satoshi's stake is worth now. You maybe check that out. Does he have more Bitcoin than Satoshi? He I don't think so.

Sam1:20:55

I think he said I think he said in the podcast three billion at one point

Interviewer1:20:59

Is three billion is his gain. He own they own $5 billion worth. So what is Satoshi's statement worth? Either way, he's one of the top five Bitcoin whales in the world. He clearly wants Bitcoin to go up and wants more people to adopt it. To me, that's like you got to have a natural discount of what somebody's saying when it comes to when they're highly highly incentivized for you to invest in that same thing. That doesn't mean he's wrong or he's like doing anything dishonest. It's like you just have to know that hey, this guy's clearly he believes it. He has high conviction and he has an incentive to make other people believe it too.

Abrau, what did you think?

Co-Panelist1:21:39

I mean, I think I

Interviewer1:21:41

Just quaking in fear right now. Say what you really want to say. Let's not not say

Co-Panelist1:21:47

I will say that I for the most part agree with what you guys said. I mean, talking about Michael himself, like super intelligent but professorial. He like he doesn't make for a great guest. And you see this on other podcasts as well. Like when Joe Rogan has like some world-renowned like super intelligent like scientists on sometimes they're they just want to go on about their field and their studies and so those don't make for the best guests. So I'll say that which is kind of sad because from my point of view I guess we both walked away from the podcast feeling a little disheartened or I don't know like whatever we didn't feel like we had a slam dunk. I think you for a different reason than me. For me, it was just I didn't think it was highly entertaining for people and I'm kind of bummed about that because I actually think it's a super [__] I think he's a super [__] interesting guy has a super interesting life and business story and also what he's doing with Bitcoin I think is super interesting. So if somehow despite there being an underlying substance that is super interesting, I don't think it got communicated. I almost wish I could just do a Billy of the Week segment just explaining everything I know about Michael Saylor, doing the research to this interview. I think that would be way more entertaining than what actually happened when he came on was basically talking about quite technical, you know, economically technical terms that I think for most people they're not going to resonate with. It's not going to click and doing it in a way that was sort of like it didn't feel like somebody who was trying to break it down and make it more accessible. It was just like this it is what it is and I can sort of explain it in bits and pieces to you if you want and if you don't see it you're crazy. You know what one of the best parts was towards the end Sean when you like took a few minutes and kind of explained what we just talked about in a high level. I thought that was like the easiest part to digest of the whole thing and more that should have been more of what the podcast was and unfortunately it wasn't. And it wasn't for a lack of research as far as like the interview not being that great. Like we put you guys put a ton of research into this. I think sometimes just the guest personality doesn't make for the best podcast.

Sam1:23:56

Well, I think people can listen to it. It's an hour long. I want to say I appreciate him coming on. Michael is a big deal. I definitely appreciate him coming on. I'm gonna I want to definitely want to take back like you know the whole I don't trust him entirely, but there's something sitting there after that interview there's something sitting right where something inside he's like something is going on here and I got to figure out what it is. Maybe we could have them on another time now that we kind of like know him a little bit more. But

Interviewer1:24:29

Yeah, I'm sure

Sam1:24:31

Themselves,

Interviewer1:24:31

You know, actually it'll be kind of interesting because we're going to leave this in by the way like the whatever our discussion about it and I hope it kind of gets received as what it is. This is a instant hot take reaction to something that we were really excited about then it happened. We're giving a quick reaction. I think you know Sam basically didn't see the kind of the Bitcoin bull case as black and white as maybe Michael Saylor put it. First of all, like let me just say that I what I my opinion of him is totally separate of Bitcoin. I would say I'm a huge novice. I'm not an expert, but I felt that he was actually he was a poor representation of it because there's something about it that I'm like, 'Oh, I don't know if I could trust this.'

Sam1:25:12

Right. Because he's representing it.

Interviewer1:25:14

You weren't buying what he was selling. I don't know. I don't know how to put it, but nothing no attack on his character. You just didn't walk away from listening to the guy for the hour and you didn't fully buy in and like we do sometimes with certain guests where they start to explain what's going on in their field or their business and we walk away saying [__] that guy knows what he's talking about and like I totally agree with the way the world is going and I want to invest in that guy's company. You know, that's sometimes the way we feel.

Sam1:25:37

He didn't persuade me if that was his goal. I don't think it I don't think goal was not achieved.

Interviewer1:25:43

Can I give people the like I'm gonna Can I try a three minute like Billy of the Week segment on this guy real quick?

Sam1:25:49

This is your podcast. You do what you want. Yeah, go for it.

Interviewer1:25:51

Oh, I mean, are you interested? I don't know if you're interested. Okay, so let me just do it. Do it.

Here's here's Okay. Michael Saylor to me is more than the Billy of the Week. He might be the Billy of the Month. Okay. So, here's some cool things about him that I found doing some research for this. So, the guy's a badass. He graduates first in his class in high school, valedictorian. He's voted most likely to succeed. He goes to MIT on a ROTC scholarship. He goes to the Air Force. He wants to be kind of like a fighter pilot. And eventually, for whatever reason he wasn't going to be able to be a fighter pilot. I think he didn't pass one of the physicals or something like that. And so he's like, because they have a very strict requirement for that. So anyways, he decides at 20 he's working at DuPont. I don't know if you knew this part, Sam. He works at DuPont when he's right out of college basically and he's doing simulations for DuPont and DuPont's trying to make a billion dollar decision. Should we invest in this or not? And if anybody's been in a big company, you know that when an executive is trying to make a case for when the executive wants to do something, it's sort of their pet project. They don't really want the simulation to be this really objective case of pros and cons. They kind of just want some data to support what they already want to do so they can go get a billion dollars of funding to go do the thing they want. And so he builds the simulation and the simulation basically says don't do it. And anyways he ends up just leaving DuPont. He's like I don't know why the hell I'm at this company. They just didn't even want the results of the simulation. They just wanted me to say what needed to be said so that some executive could go pitch their case. So I'm leaving this place. And the executive is basically like, 'Hey, where's that kid who's doing that model? I need that data.' And he's like and they're like, 'He left the company. He quit.' And so the guy's like, 'Go hire him back. Give him what he wants.' And so they go to him and they say, 'Hey, we want to hire you back and we'll give you more money.' And he's like, 'I don't really want to work there, so I don't want more money.' And then the executive's like, 'Give him more. Give him whatever he wants. Just give it to him.' And he's like, 'Well, I kind of want to start my own company. So why don't we do this? You give me a quarter million dollars and I want to hire some of my colleagues from DuPont. I want to hire eight to 10 people from there. And I want you to be my first customer. So I want you to give me a few million dollars worth of contracts to do work for you. And I'm going to start my company MicroStrategy which does the same simulating thing for companies and you'll be my first customer.' So pretty badass negotiation. He goes and instead of being an employee, he basically gets DuPont to seed fund his company and become a multi-million dollar customer for him. So from there he's 24 years old. That's MicroStrategy how it starts. Basically what they do is what's called business intelligence or executive intelligence. They take all the data you have. So like you're Victoria's Secret. You have all this data of purchasing and all your stores all across the country. MicroStrategy goes in and says, 'Hey, you're carrying the wrong sizes. You need bigger bras in Chicago than in New York. So if you rebalance your inventory, you're going to save all this money and there's data. You're sitting on this gold mine of data. You just don't know how to analyze it. We can give you intelligence from this data.' So he does that for McDonald's and for Victoria's Secret and all these different companies. By 34, he's a billionaire. The company's public. It's worth 11 billion. He owns the majority of the company owns over 50%. And he's doing his thing now over time 2003 2004 stock price crashes from $333 a share to 42 cents a share or something like that and he goes through that whole transition he's been the CEO of MicroStrategy for like 30 years like literally I was born in 1988 Sam's born in 1989 he's been the CEO of MicroStrategy since 1989 you know like that's pretty wild and more recently like you know MicroStrategy has been flat for like a decade stock price not really going anywhere business is profitable. He's got $500 million of cash in the bank, but the stock price is not growing. And he's like

Sam1:29:32

$500 million. I think personally, he said,

Interviewer1:29:35

No, no, I think in this case it was the corporate treasury had about $500, $600 million. He owns the majority of the company. I think he owns currently like

Sam1:29:42

No, I think I think in the podcast he was like, I have whatever he's basically he was incredibly wealthy and the company was great. He's incredibly wealthy and the company is incredibly wealthy and he basically

Interviewer1:29:53

Comes to this realization during the COVID crash and he's talked about this on other podcasts which is he comes to this realization that wait a minute if the money supply you know we hear about government stimulus we hear governments printing $2 trillion $6 trillion $13 trillion total the money supply is increasing which means if you had $500 million in the bank if you go back and look it'll still say $500 million but it won't be able to buy you as much as it did before because there's all this trillions of new dollars in the money supply and similarly like people have been wondering during COVID wait a minute all the businesses are shut down and people are locked in their homes why are all the stock prices at all-time highs what's this disconnect between main street and wall street and what he's pointing out I think rightfully so is that when you have all this money printing assets inflate basically assets like companies inflate so that's why the stock prices are going up it's that you know Zoom is a bad example. It's not that Apple is making all this much more money than they were three months ago. It's that Apple's stock is more of a hard asset to own versus just keeping cash and dollars which is getting printed and diluted essentially by the government. Right? So long story short, MicroStrategy goes out and they basically do this aggressive strategy to buy a quarter billion dollars of Bitcoin. They're kind of the first public company to go do such a bold bet. And then he keeps buying Bitcoin more and more and more. He's basically bought $2 billion of Bitcoin. So, first he took all the money they have, majority of the money they have and they bought Bitcoin with it. And he first announced it and he told his shareholders, 'Look, we're going to buy a bunch of Bitcoin with our cash. If you don't want to hold our shares, we'll buy your shares back from you if you don't like that strategy.' So, they bought $60 $70 million back. They use the rest of the cash to buy Bitcoin. Then he starts issuing debt. He goes and he raises $500 million. He goes raises a billion dollars of debt from the public markets. Takes all that money, buys Bitcoin with it. And so since then, he's basically put in $2 billion. He's gained $3 billion and he has a total stake of Bitcoin of $5 billion, which I think makes MicroStrategy a top five owner of Bitcoin in the world. Just behind Satoshi and maybe a couple others. And since then, famously Elon tweeted out something about Bitcoin. Michael Saylor responded saying, 'Hey, from one rocket scientist to another, let me show you how we let me explain to you why we did it and you should, too.' And a few months later, Tesla goes and buys $1.5 billion of Bitcoin. So, he's kind of was ahead of the curve on this stuff. In addition to that, some other cool things early on in the do he sort of identified early on that the internet was going to be a big deal and bought a bunch of domains. So we spent about $2 million buying domains like alarm.com, wisdom.com, strategy.com, Michael.com, Mike.com, Angel.com, Courage, hope and he owns all these premium domains, one word English word domains. And he has since sold or created businesses under those domains for over a hundred billion dollars. So he turned one or two million dollar domain purchases into over a hundred million dollars of value. He also has this thing called Saylor.org which is just like a free education. It's just a free university. And he said, since 1999 they've had over half a million students in it. This guy's done a bunch of cool stuff and I think is like a pirate of the best kind. Like super smart technologist, super smart business guy, has just been in the game for so long and is doing pretty radical things. So that's why, you know, I think this guy's a baller. Unfortunately, I didn't feel that all that came through on the podcast, but you know, I'm a fan. I think Michael and his team will reach out and say thank you, Sean, because I think that you did an awesome job of showing off him than him. Which is cool. And I think you're just better at storytelling. So maybe people will have the same opinion after this interview. The part that I kind of was like, I don't know how I feel about this. It happens like probably 15 minutes left in the episode. Maybe Abrau or someone will mark it and you guys will be able to hear for yourselves, but I think Sean, you're just really good at this. And I guess we'll see. This episode is going to be weird. I wonder what the people are going to say. I guess we'll find out.

Sam1:34:23

Yeah, same. All right, cool.