Strategy CEO Phong Le Reveals the Path to 1,000,000 Bitcoin | The Future of Digitization

What is Stretch? Stretch is an ability to take your money and put it into an equity, security, an account that pays you at 11-12% monthly. And that's the most basic form of Bitcoin as we simplify it more and more over time. And of course with that simplification from Bitcoin to digital asset treasury companies to Stretch, it gives more people access to Bitcoin. And to your point, as we raise money into Stretch, what do we do? We feed it back into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I'm doing awesome. Thanks for having me.

Well, I'll start with there's a lot that has changed in the last year. You were just asking me what's my favorite Bitcoin era, and it's always the current present one, right? Because there's just so much innovation, so much change. A year ago, we were at this event, Bitcoin Vegas 2025, and the big emerging conversation was Bitcoin Treasury companies, DATs, whatever you want to call them. And we went from having four to 200 around the world in the course of literally a year. And that was fantastic, right? A DAT for every country, for every market, different purposes, even ones that hold other cryptocurrencies. Fantastic. Great. And now here we fast forward to literally just a year later and we have this emergence of a brand new asset class built on the back of Bitcoin which is what you just mentioned, perpetual preferred called Stretch. And what's awesome and exciting about Stretch is, you know, Bitcoin, right, digital capital, it's a tough concept. Here we sit in the echo chamber of Bitcoin Vegas, everyone here gets it. You go outside in the real world, it's a difficult concept to grasp. You need to understand finance, corporate finance, macroeconomics, cryptography, computer engineering, computer science, all these things, right? And so we put on top of that digital equities, right, which are these digital asset treasury companies. So, basically, publicly traded companies to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. A little bit easier because people sort of get, I can buy a stock, a four-letter ticker on the NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange, and it has access to Bitcoin. It's a little easier. But if you go out into the real world, there are a lot of people who don't invest in equities. They don't invest in stocks, right? Or don't have access for whatever reason. So, we said, how do you strip it down and make it even easier? And forget about the word perpetual preferred and all that kind of stuff for a sec. What is Stretch? Stretch is an ability to take your money and put it into an equity security, an account that pays you at 11-12% monthly, right? And that's the most basic form of Bitcoin as we simplify it more and more over time. And of course with that simplification from Bitcoin to digital asset treasury companies to Stretch, it gives more people access to Bitcoin. And to your point, as we raise money into Stretch, what do we do? We feed it back into the Bitcoin ecosystem. And it's allowed us to accumulate over 800,000 Bitcoin. And a lot of that accumulation has occurred because of Stretch.

Yeah, there's a lot of websites, there are prediction market guesses on when we're going to reach a million. I'll tell you, I don't know when we're going to reach a million, right? Obviously, we're going to continue to try to grow Bitcoin per share by selling as much Stretch into the market as possible. And you know, the million is just a number, right? It's not like we stop at a million.

No.

Yeah. So, very simply, what do we do, right? We take, we sell Stretch, which is a perpetual preferred product. You can buy it on the NASDAQ, go into Robinhood, you buy Stretch. All right? And every month you get paid at the end of the month. So, for example, if you hold Stretch on April 15th, on April 30th, you get paid 11.5% annualized. So, about a percent a month. That's sort of what happens to the shareholder of Stretch. What happens to us is that money you put into Stretch, let's say you buy 10 shares and you buy $1,000, right? And as the demand for Stretch outstrips people selling Stretch, we raise that money and then we put that $1,000 into Bitcoin. So how do we actually pay the dividend? What happens with Bitcoin is our prediction as it goes up 30% a year, right? And we hold Bitcoin, right? And as it goes up 30% a year, we're able to pay the 11-12%. So we basically get the spread, the 18.5% in between. That's basically what happens. An individual isn't able to do that at scale. A small company can't do that at scale. But we can do that at scale because we have so much Bitcoin. And that's basically the process. We have unrealized gains on our Bitcoin through our equity. The equity value increases as those unrealized gains occur. And so we can take those gains of the equity to pay out to our investors. It's a beautiful thing.

Well, you know, I used to think this idea of Bitcoin for corporations was for everyone to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And we've seen a lot of friction in large established companies with established boards and established investment policies putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. So, let's put that aside for a minute. What do you really want to do? You know, an iPhone is a platform for consumers to do pretty much anything, right? And people are building apps into mobile devices. Well, what is still a pretty hard thing to do, right? And that everyone wants to do? Buying and selling stocks, equities. Even Robinhood has made it simpler, but the reality is we're still relying on very archaic rails, broker dealers, exchanges, regulatory rules. And so for example very simply you can't buy and sell Strategy stock, Stretch, Apple stock 24/7, right? You can only do it from 9:30 to 4:00, 5 days a week, right? What should Apple do? Apple should create an ability, right? What has Apple done for payments as an example, right? The idea that I can have on my wallet my credit card, double-click, Face ID, pay for a coffee, that's great. What if I could do the same thing with a share of Stretch that I own? What if I could actually have a tokenized version on decentralized finance rails, a share of Stretch? And I say, 'Hey, Izzy, you want to buy my share of Stretch for $100? That's the market prevailing price.' And you're like, 'Yes,' I touch your phone and all of a sudden you have the stock. Right? That's the future world of tokenization of securities that actually is being worked through from a regulatory perspective with the SEC and others, right? And that's the world we should get to because buying and selling of securities should be just as easy as buying and selling of coffee, right? So the advice to Apple is this is happening. It's going to happen. It'll happen likely somewhere in the next one to two years. And I think that's a beautiful world. Anytime you can reduce the friction of commerce, what do you do? You give access to everybody the ability to buy and sell stocks as tokenized assets, tokenized securities. And I think that would be a great thing.

I'll tell you a couple of things. One is, as everyone realizes, the innovation, the intelligence, the intensity that comes with Michael Saylor, that comes through very front and center and it's obvious when you spend time with him or you watch him on TV or on X or YouTube or whatever it is. He's also an extraordinarily kind and caring person. And I don't think people quite realize that. And of course, you know, for who he is, there is a veneer, but once you get past that veneer, Mike's one of the nicest people, you know, really caring. You know, he expresses his caring in different ways. I'll tell you another story that I shared the other day is, you know, he takes all that caring and he puts it into his life's work, Bitcoin Strategy, and he gives it back in that way. Every now and then Mike loves his analogies and his metaphors and he'll sometimes give me, 'You know, Phong, it's like raising kids, right?' And I have three kids and I'll let him give me his analogy. I'm like, 'Mike, what do you know about raising kids, dude?' And of course, you know, I think once he's like, 'I was a kid once.' So, no, he's just a fantastic, kind, caring person.

Well, I'll start with whenever you're doing something that's different, that's popular, that people are talking about, haters will emerge, right? And haters get more attention than lovers unfortunately in today's sort of eyeball soundbite economy if you will, right? And so there are people out there, let's say for example 70% of people like Strategy, 30% hate Strategy. Of that 30% of haters, like at least 80% of them, right? So at least 24% of all the people who talk about Strategy hate just to say, right? They're not educated. They don't really understand the company. They don't understand what Bitcoin is. They don't understand what a digital asset treasury company is. They don't understand what perpetual preferred is. They just hate. Why do they hate? Because that gets them attention, right? They're perpetual haters out there. And so I just dismiss those folks, right? Like they're the folks that when you see someone post something on X, the first thing they do is they swear and they say that's terrible, and it's within one second of something getting posted. They're not even reading the thing. Their immediate reaction is to hate. Then, you know, I'll call it the 6% of people who talk about Strategy who are haters who actually have a foundation for a reason, you know, based off of education research to not like what we're doing. You have to listen to them. You have to learn and understand. Okay. So what are they saying, right? Why are they saying it? Because within that there are nuggets of truth and you have to understand, you know, it can change your position. It can change your product. It can change your philosophy if you understand those nuggets of truth. So there are some useful haters, there are some perpetual haters and there are lovers and you need to listen to the useful haters and the lovers and those in between just ignore them.