Living there yourself, you feel safe living in UAE in Abu Dhabi?
Very safe. When you think about all the things that you can't buy with money, you can go to a restaurant, the customer doesn't, you know, the waitress doesn't give you good service, you can buy the restaurant and say you're no longer here. You have that kind of money. You can go to a sports game, you don't like the team's management, you can make a massive offer the next day and buy an NBA team or an NFL team. But when it comes down to security, living out of place, what made you pick UAE out of all the places to live in?
I mean, it is the safest country in the world.
You can, if you drop your wallet on the street and it has like, I don't know, 3,000 bucks in there, you walk, you come back in a week, it's still there. You'll find it and people who find it will return it with the cash in there. There's basically zero crime. There's no petty crime, no big crimes, etc. And the physical security on the street translates into financial security, fintech, it's just very well run. And also the leadership of the country is very pro-business, very very smart, very very calibrated, extremely visionary. So it's one of the best places to be.
Yeah. Do you think about the importance of, like, what level of importance do you put on where to raise your family on the strength of the military of that country in today's turbulent times that we have? Do you say, man, I wish UAE had a stronger military or no?
Well, I think I was actually surprised at how strong the military of UAE is. I didn't know until there were like missiles flying in and they were intercepting it. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. And you have to think about it, right? How much do you have to prepare that in advance to be able to intercept that many missiles coming in? It takes years and years of preparation, so that foresight there, that's really hard to match. I think UAE does rely very heavily on US support for military equipment and technology.
They rely on us for that?
So they're a very strong partner for the US, so I think that they do quite well there. But other than that, I think the country is just very, very well governed. If you have sensible leaders, you have smart leaders that are fair and that want the country to grow instead of growing their own pockets, then you have a pretty good country. Yeah.
I saw a stat the other day and I wonder how you answered this one. In the 70s, in the S&P 500, it showed that, you know, 85 to 93% of the wealth was tied to tangible assets in 1970.
Yeah. Yeah. So if somebody was a billionaire and they lived in a state, they ran a business, they couldn't move to another state or they couldn't move to another country because it's tangible asset wealth that they have. Today we've gone from 85 to 93% back in the days to now it's the other way around. 92% is in intangible assets, patents, you know, brands, you know, Bitcoin, crypto, AI, all this stuff that they're building. Moving forward, do you think this is going to be a threat to countries that don't know how to handle small business owners or big businesses? That person can say, great, I'm going to go move in UAE, I'm going to go to Singapore. How do you view that with how much of the wealth today is tangible instead of intangible?
I think that's a great point. I agree with you 100%, which is right now if you look at the wealth today, it's IP, it's technology, it's crypto. They have no borders. Even with IP and technology, there's some country limitations, right? So if you run AI, you're running in US or you're running in China, you're still kind of confined to those countries. Whereas in blockchain, in our industry, crypto, there's no borders. Your Bitcoin is yours no matter where you are. You fly to a different country, you don't have to even make a transfer, that crypto stays with you, right? And also technology startups, we're seeing a lot of technology companies amassing very high valuations and those are the big drivers for economies of countries and the world. They can be based anywhere. So this is good and bad. So now countries with favorable regulations, with good leadership, good regulations, good environments will attract this top talent. And talent is very mobile now. You get educated in one country, you can move to a different country very easily. You learn your skill, you know, you can also work remotely. Like, Binance has remote work, 5,000 people working remotely, so all of this is possible now.
In how many countries are the 5,000?
I don't really know for sure, but more than 100 countries, I would say.
You have 5,000 employees working for Binance?
In 100 plus countries, everyone's remote?
Pretty much everyone's remote, yeah. So I don't run Binance anymore, but this stat is pretty public.
