$1.5M Bitcoin Is Coming (Saylor's $300T Plan)

We want five or 10% of all the credit in the world. So if the credit's 300 trillion, we want 15 to 30 trillion of it to flow into Bitcoin-backed credit instruments. We want 5, 10, 20, 30% of all the money markets in the world to flow into digital money. There's 1 trillion in Bitcoin and there's 1,000 trillion elsewhere. Digital capital is competitive with metallic capital, real estate capital, equity capital, and credit capital. What is money? Well, gold is money. Everything else is credit according to JP Morgan 100 years ago. Bitcoin is money. Everything else is credit according to Michael Saylor.

Yeah. On Bitcoin, I think we're in a classic bear market. I think it's a really mild bear market by Bitcoin standards to date. I think interestingly you would think about an issuer of digital credit, someone that tries to amplify Bitcoin exposure. And I just can't wait to get into the answers to the questions from the last panel. But I would expect in a Bitcoin bear market when Bitcoin's at its 200-week moving average for capital markets for someone like us to be largely shut. That was our assumption. Two weeks ago we had the largest Bitcoin buy in our history. Bought over 200 Bitcoin. The week before, 1100 Bitcoin. For us that's massive raises. Even last week we bought 32 Bitcoin, which if you know, you know.

The price may be higher. But I think the capital market's open, which means that the bear scenarios for us are less bad than I think they could have been and that we were prepared for. And so we're ready to weather the storm. I think digital credit is behaving really well. It's interesting to note that Bitcoin is down over 50% since its high. Right now, both SEDA and STRC have had positive total returns during a Bitcoin bear market. And if you think about that as a capital allocator, someone that wants to buy something that has reduced volatility, that has income, that is success in my view. So to me, all systems go, we're in a bear market, we'll weather the storm and we'll get out. What's your perspective?

That's a good point. If you put on the Austrian economic hat and you look what is money? Well, gold is money. Everything else is credit according to JP Morgan 100 years ago. Bitcoin is money. Everything else is credit according to Michael Saylor 100 weeks ago. That is true, right? Everything else has counterparty risk and Bitcoin is the form of capital which doesn't have that. So that's the Austrian school of thought or the Bitcoin standard and that's how you would use money. But if you go to the fiat school of thought and the Keynesian standard, the way they think of money is it's something that has zero volatility to a fiat currency. So if you look at the seven trillion dollars of money or the trillions of dollars in a money market fund, it has to be zero V generating yield pegged to a fiat currency whether it's euros or dollars. So when we describe a digital asset stack with digital capital, that is a fiat term. We're basically saying digital capital is competitive with metallic capital, real estate capital, equity capital, and credit capital. Digital capital is a fiat term. Bitcoin is much more than that, right? When we say digital credit, that's a fiat term. It's digital credit competing with mortgage-backed credit, junk credit, private credit, sovereign credit, investment-grade corporate credit, etc. When we use the word digital money, it's a fiat term. It means zero V digital currency with zero volatility backed by Bitcoin that pays a yield. So why would we call it digital money? Well, because 99.9% of all the capital in the world is on a fiat standard. There's one trillion in Bitcoin and there's 1,000 trillion elsewhere. And so there might be a few gold bugs that would agree with me that gold is money and Bitcoin is money and everything else is credit and they would say money markets are not money. Maybe a few, but for the most part, everybody with the capital in the world that we need to attract and bridge into Bitcoin, they think money is a zero volatility USD or euro or JPY denominated fund or asset that pays some kind of yield. And so what we're building, Matt and I and other people that are building on this, whether it's like people like Saturn or Apex, they're building either digital yield or they're building digital money and we're building digital credit on top of digital capital. And the objective is pretty simple, right? We want five or 10% of all the credit in the world. So if the credit's 300 trillion, we want 15 to 30 trillion of it to flow into Bitcoin-backed credit instruments and then we want 5, 10, 20, 30% of all the money markets in the world to flow into digital money, right? And at the end of the day, the conventional view of money is money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value. And if you ask how do you become a medium of exchange? Well, if you go and crawl the web, you'll find that 99.9999% of all the prices in the world are denominated in fiat currencies. I didn't make it that way. It just turns out that 99.9999% of all the prices are US dollars or euros or yen. So if you want to create perfect money in the eyes of the people that have the $1,000 trillion dollars, and they're the only ones that matter because they have the money and we need the capital, their idea is it's pegged to the dollar with zero V, right? Because that way I can exchange it friction-free without a tax hit in order to convert it into a currency and pay for anything. And it's in dollars which is the unit of account of every accounting system of every multinational in the world has been and will be, and it pays you a yield which is in excess of the monetary debasement rate, which means that if you can get above 7% then you've got a perfect store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account in the eyes of every non-Bitcoin maximalist in the world, and it's their opinion that matters if you're actually trying to sell something to them. And so when I say digital money, I mean zero volatility pegged to a fiat currency that pays a yield. And it's got to be backed by Bitcoin if you're going to do it in an economically sound, technically sound, ethically sound fashion.

Yeah. I think a lot of I have a big following with regard to Bitcoin believers and Bitcoin fundamentalists, and the like. And somehow a lot of times the misnomer is they somehow think that we're encouraging people not to buy Bitcoin or self-custody when we're selling SATA or selling STRK. And the truth is I never met anybody that owned STRK that actually thought it was a substitute for owning Bitcoin. Just about everybody that I've ever met that bought it bought it in lieu of holding money market or holding a credit instrument or having money invested in S&P ETFs or some other equity. So the people that we're finding are non-Bitcoin holders or we're attracting pools of capital. If you're a Bitcoiner and you need the money in the next 12 months to pay your kids' tuition, well, only half of your children would have got to school this year, right? The other half would have to stay home because of the 50% drawdown. So there's a lot of people that believe in Bitcoin, but they're not going to put 100% of all their family's capital into it. They're always going to need to hold back some portion. So we're providing really an alternative to JPMorgan or to PFF or to your favorite bank's money market fund that pays 2%. And that's the competition right now. All these new products just like with the tokens people get worked over some like Saturn and Apex. There's nobody that's buying Saturn or Apex that would otherwise have bought Bitcoin and held it in cold storage. These are basically Asian, Chinese, off-the-grid, South American, African crypto investors and they're buying those yield coins instead of Tether, right? They're either holding a stable coin which is 80% backed by currency equivalents or you're holding a 100% backed compliant stable coin that pays zero because you're from Turkey or you're from South Africa or fill in the blank. Every single place you're either holding that or you're going to buy a yield coin backed by Bitcoin. And so when you think about it, don't think that none of these things compete with the underlying capital asset. All they're doing is expanding the network. The real competition is for the $999 trillion of capital that's either invested in the TradFi economy or right now for the $350-400 billion, what do you buy if you want yield in crypto? You buy Solana or Ethereum or you buy a Bitcoin-backed token powered by digital credit. So those tokens are competing with Solana, Ethereum, the other crypto yields or they're competing with stable coins that generate yield from trading crypto like Athena or they're competing with stable coins that pay no yield. And so when you create these products, you're expanding the market and you're drawing more capital into the base layer, which is good for Bitcoin. And you're also creating an opportunity like if you're a Chinese investor, how the heck are you supposed to actually invest your money and get paid, especially if you just can't stand the volatility. And I think Matt, you've been selling Bitcoin longer, but trust me, I have spent thousands of hours of my life selling Bitcoin to corporations and individuals, and it is a large effort. You know when we pitched it to Microsoft, did we get like 1% of the vote? It was 0.1% of the shareholders voted for it. It's a very challenging effort to convince corporations and most individuals to invest in a 40 V asset. On the other hand, everybody's interested in something that pays them two to four times more than the money market if you can strip the volatility off it. So we actually think that if you want to grow Bitcoin by a factor of 10 or a hundred, you're not going to do it by preaching to people or even educating them. Trust me, we've spent more money educating than ever. If we actually spent a hundred billion dollars a year educating people on Bitcoin, we wouldn't grow the market as rapidly as we're doing it with digital credit right now. Because at the end of the day, the right product spreads virally word of mouth. People just tell their mothers, fathers, sisters, uncles, buy the thing. And the world is not ready for 40 V, 30 or 40 V asset for most of that capital. No matter, it's not a matter of education. It's just they don't have that much capital that can handle that V in that pocket and that can buy a commodity.

Sure. So it turns out if you want to invest in the equity of a publicly traded company and you want to do it responsibly, you have to actually have an attention span, which means you have to read the filings and look at the conference calls. There are 100,000 pages of SEC filings on our company and there's thousands of pages that cover the balance sheet and what we've done, what we're going to do. So if you're assessing our business, for example, a lot of misnomers fly around. The idea that selling equity is dilutive is a misnomer. The truth is it's massively accretive. If you calculate assets per share after or net assets per share after adjusting for the liabilities, everything we're doing is accretive whether we swap equity for Bitcoin or swap equity for cash. So that's the first observation. A second, the actual gain or loss on the Bitcoin position is totally irrelevant if you actually bought the Bitcoin substantially with equity. If you sell, all of the Bitcoin we purchased was 80% of it was equity. So at all points in time, we sold it at a premium that was higher than the net asset value. So we sold I think we raised $21 billion of equity in a matter of months in 2024. We did it at a premium of 200% over the Bitcoin. So we raised 21 billion of equity. We bought 21 billion of Bitcoin. We banked a 14 billion Bitcoin gain. It doesn't matter whether the Bitcoin trades down 30%, you would show a $4 billion loss. But the point is you bought the Bitcoin with equity that was triple the current price. So you have to actually keep in mind that when you're swapping equity for Bitcoin, the only thing that really matters is did you do it at a premium to net asset value after adjusting for liabilities, right? And you have to adjust for all the liabilities on the balance sheet. Was it at a premium to net asset value? And it is, I mean there might be a couple of days in the history of the company where we didn't do that but it would just be a few days. And the second issue is if it's equity, if you can sell a hundred billion dollars of equity at $1,000 a share and the equity trades to $100 a share and the Bitcoin trades down 80%, do you really care that you're showing an 80 billion dollar loss? You still actually are better off than if you hadn't sold the equity in the first place. So if you're actually buying Bitcoin on margin credit, like if you're buying it with a loan that comes due next week, it matters what price you paid for it. If I borrowed a billion dollars from an exchange and I bought the billion dollars and it traded down 50%, that's a problem. If you're buying it for long-dated duration debt, it's much less of an issue. When you're buying it for a hybrid instrument like a preferred stock, the issue with the preferred is all the options switch. So the stochastic cost of capital is lower than the nominal cost of capital because of all the options that accrue to the issuer. For example, with STRC we have the option to lower the dividend when SOFR falls. We have the option to lower the credit spread when we want. We have the options to delay the dividends if we need to. Those options are obscenely valuable to the issuer. And a simple way to look at it is if you're paying 11.5% right now, probably the real cost of capital is 8.5% over 20 years. And because the principle never comes due, you can't ever have a liquidation event. It's a continuous cost. So let me boil this down to a simple observation. If you think that Bitcoin is going to appreciate more than 8.5% a year, then all of our Bitcoin gains are net income. If you don't think Bitcoin's going to appreciate, if you think it's going to appreciate 0% a year, we have like 30-35 years before we run out of money. But our assumption is if you think Bitcoin is going to appreciate 3.2% a year, we pay the dividends forever without selling a share of stock. Okay? And how long do we have for Bitcoin to trade 3%? What's the duration? 30 years. So over 30 years, the equity bet and the credit bets are this. The credit bet is over 30 years, Bitcoin will appreciate 3% or more. And if it doesn't, the credit quality deteriorates. That's the credit bet. And the company can pay the dividends literally forever at 3%. The equity bet is that Bitcoin is going to outperform the cost of capital of the company, which again, most people can't calculate it. They don't really understand it, but probably it's like 8 or 9%. But let's just make it easy, 10%. If Bitcoin appreciates 10% a year, then the equity outperforms Bitcoin because the leverage is all accretive. If Bitcoin goes up 4% a year, then the equity is mildly underperforming Bitcoin over time probably, although we have the float and a lot of optionality there that we can use. But between 3% and 10% the equity may underperform Bitcoin, right? If Bitcoin falls 10% a year, then the credit will become distressed debt. So if you're a credit investor, don't buy the credit if you think Bitcoin's falling 10%. That's obvious. If you're an equity investor, don't buy the equity if you don't think Bitcoin's going to go up more than 10%. And everything in the middle is just managed by the company. But I think a lot of times people will do things like they'll say, 'Well, you have to sell at this price to get a positive yield.' A positive Bitcoin yield. But the truth is the hurdle rate for accretion on a US dollar basis is lower. And so you have the challenge with Bitcoin treasury companies is you have to be simultaneously calculating on a US dollar standard and a BTC standard at all times. And you have to also evaluate liabilities and assets. A lot of times people think preferred equity is a liability. It's only a liability in liquidation. It's impossible to ever get to liquidation. The only way to get to a liquidation event is for the debt to come due. And so if there's no debt like your company or if I have de minimis debt, you're never in a liquidation. But since you're never in a liquidation, the preferred equity isn't a liability. It's an asset and it's equity. So the thing that breaks people's brains is if you assume that you're in a liquidation, then you can think that digital credit is a liability and then you can be all gloom and doom. But since it's impossible to get to a liquidation based on purely digital credit, the only way to get to a liquidation event is you have to have debt that comes due. So it turns out when you're running one of these companies, you have massive optionality and you have control over when you finance things. So most of these narratives start with, 'Well, let's assume that Bitcoin falls 80% and never recovers and then you're in liquidation, then you've got a problem.' And the truth is with every single business on Earth, if you start with a 'let's assume that all of your assets deteriorate 80% and you're in liquidation and they never recover,' there is no business on earth that doesn't look dire if you just make that assumption. But if you start to think a bit more thoughtfully about it, you realize, well, how do I actually ever get to that point? And what does the world look like? And the truth is the businesses are pretty anti-fragile and as the equities fall, the amplification increases and they just get more compelling. So just like digital credit tends to be self-healing and snaps back to par. If Bitcoin crashes, the demand for digital credit falls, which means the creditworthiness and the forward look, the credit profile looks better in the future. And the same is true with the equity. So we're attracting demand for the credit and demand for the equity as the assets trade down. And that's what creates the stability for them to trade back up again.

Yeah. So, shall we take questions from the audience? I think we covered a lot of stuff. Thank you very much. I'll hand the mic to the questioners.

On the second one, Satoshi seems to have a number of wallets and there's a bit more than a million bitcoins. So I suppose Satoshi is the largest holder. On the first question, we actually have a bunch of ATMs. We have ATMs on the perpetual instruments like STRD, STRF, STRK. We have an ATM on the common equity MSTR and we have an ATM on the credit instrument STRC. And so they're all dynamically adjusted and programmatically run based upon a set of parameters. And it's a function of the equity capital markets, the credit markets, the Bitcoin market, our decision about what to buy or what to sell or what to swap. It's not just adjusted weekly or daily, but it's literally adjusted minute by minute. So what you'll see is we think and we have other options like for example we could go out and sell bonds. You'll notice we have six bonds outstanding. We haven't sold any more bonds. We'll retire all the bonds. So that's just turned off the debt. The debt part of our business we don't see as being strategic or advantageous. You'll notice in our 8K filings we haven't sold any STRD, STRF or STRK. That's because we think they're undervalued. The cost of capital would be too high and we'd be locking in that dividend too long perpetually. So what I would say to you is if you like Bitcoin and you like the company, you should buy those things because I'm not selling those things, right? I wouldn't sell them because I think they're too expensive as a form of capital and they're undervalued. And so we do actively manage that. If STRF were to trade to $200 a share and the cost of capital is 5% for perpetual money, maybe we might start selling it again. So we consider that based upon SOFR and the forward yield curve and the credit markets and the like with STRC. We won't sell at a penny below par and we will sell a lot of it at a penny above par and that's because one of the primary functions of that is to strip all the volatility and that's how we do it and to support the instrument. We allocate our capital to buying Bitcoin or buying dollars depending upon the credit markets and where we are and we're swapping back between buying debt, buying dollars, buying Bitcoin. We've sold some Bitcoin. We sell credit, we sell dollars to buy the bonds. So there's a lot of things we're doing. They're all just dynamically adjusted, and it's just a function of the forward curves and the premiums in the derivatives market, the capital market, the equity market, and all the credit markets. And they're all different and we evaluate them all the time generally with the theme that we want to do things that are equity positive, things that are accretive to the equity. We want to do things that are credit positive, things that are supportive of the credit, especially STRC. We've done a dozen things to support STRC. And then we want to do things that are Bitcoin positive. And sometimes the interests of those three groups are a little bit across purposes and we have to balance those interests one versus the other. And that's pretty much our business, really thinking thoughtfully all the time about those things.

Yeah. A point I'll make on that, we'll take the next question. If you think Bitcoin is going to appreciate at about 10% or about our cost of capital, then when we report a Bitcoin gain that is comparable to net income. We have a $5 billion Bitcoin gain this year so far, we're on track to maybe get to 10, but we had just slightly south of 10 last year. But if we report a $5 billion Bitcoin gain for you to believe that that is valuable, you have to assume Bitcoin is not falling to zero tomorrow. If you think that Bitcoin is falling 10% a year, then Bitcoin gain isn't that interesting because you're discounting at 10%. But if you think that Bitcoin's going up 0% a year, then we might have incurred a liability. We sold STRK to buy the Bitcoin. I get it. If you think that Bitcoin's going up 10% a year, I sold a billion dollars of STRK to buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin. I'm never paying the money back. The Bitcoin I bought with it is paying the dividend cost because it's going up 10% a year and it's compounding. So the truth is if Bitcoin could probably go up like 8% a year and we could probably have a cost of capital of 10%, all of the gain is net income. If you think Bitcoin is going up 30% a year when we report a five billion dollar Bitcoin gain, that's like 15 billion. It's five billion up front and it's probably another 10 billion on the back end. So the business has obscene profitability, but the reason it's so controversial is your view of the equity is going to have to be modulated through your view of the forward Bitcoin price just like your view of the credit has to be modulated through your view of the forward Bitcoin performance and the Bitcoin V. And you can come to an opinion that the credit is distressed and the equity is awful if you have a negative Bitcoin position or opinion. And you can come to an opinion that we're going to dramatically outperform Bitcoin and generate 50% a year, which is sort of what we've done for the past five years, and that the credit is all investment grade if you have a positive view toward Bitcoin. And since most of the people that are in the market have very divergent views or don't even articulate what their view is before they express an opinion, that's why you get so much controversy and back and forth on that matter. Next question.

Hey Jack.