The Genisis of Core Scientific with Mike Levitt
About Mike Levitt
Mike Levitt, co-founder, co-chairman, and CEO of Core Scientific, discussed the company's origins and operations in a series of interviews in 2022. He stated that the idea for the company originated with his partner Darren Feinstein, who identified a lack of high-quality, institutional-grade infrastructure for bitcoin mining in the United States. Levitt described the company's first facility as a shuttered textile manufacturing plant in North Carolina that was adapted for mining. He explained that Core Scientific both mines bitcoin for its own account and provides hosting services for other customers, arguing that scale allows the company to offer lower costs and higher uptime. During 2022, Levitt addressed the "crypto winter" and the company's decision to sell most of its bitcoin reserves in June. He said that miners, like other businesses, need to pay expenses in dollars and that selling bitcoin to maintain strong balance sheets was a sensible strategy during turbulent market conditions. He described the liquidations of firms such as Three Arrows Capital, Voyager, Terra Luna, and Celsius as "extraordinary events" but expressed optimism that companies that survive the downturn would thrive. Levitt also characterized bitcoin as a digital asset and a store of value, noting that the IRS and SEC do not treat it as a currency, and he predicted that blockchain technology would be adopted across industries due to its efficiency and security.