EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Michael Saylor Reveals What Went Wrong For Bitcoin...

Hundreds of billions of dollars in 17 years to get here. And what we know is Bitcoin is the dominant global digital capital network. So what is that worth? Even if only 10% of the capital wants to be digital, then that's a hundred trillion. By the way, how much Bitcoin has BlackRock sold in the past 3 months? Do you know for every Bitcoin we sold, other actors in the market have sold 2,000x. So in the middle of a bear market, Bitcoin crashed from 120,000 to 60,000 and we sold 32 Bitcoin. We have bought net 250,000 Bitcoin or something. In what way are we at systemic risk? So Bitcoin was 120,000 8 months ago. It's 60,000 now. It's sitting around the 200-week moving average now. So there's a massive base of support which means that by the way, you know who was buying the ETFs? A lot of them were the hedge funds shorting our stock. So there were people shorting 25 billion of MSTR and buying 25 billion of IBIT as the pair trade. What do you think would happen if we basically sold 250,000 Bitcoin right now?

Before I answer that, I'll just say one funny thing. In six years, our company went from an enterprise value of 600 million to an enterprise value of up to 120 billion and now it's like 80 billion or something. Not a single positive story in any mainstream media in the entire six years. Not one. And then when I became chairman and Phong was CEO, they said Saylor got fired. And then they ran a bunch of negative stories: Saylor got pushed out of the company, fired because the Bitcoin thing failed. And that was when we had two billion of Bitcoin. And then when we got to the point where we had 50 billion of Bitcoin, I guess two or three weeks ago, Bitcoin traded from 82,000 to 62,000. So we had a $16 billion mark-to-market loss. And so the story is, Saylor's company lost $16 billion. They basically revived me, put me back in charge of the company, and then made me responsible for the failed strategy, which I thought was amusing. But nobody... So if you have 800,000 Bitcoin and it trades down 20,000, you'll have a $16 billion mark-to-market loss. But nobody ever once asked the question, where'd they get the $16 billion to lose? Because we started the journey with $250 million of cash. And of course, the story is a company with $250 million managed to find a way to actually get the $80 billion to lose the $16 billion. But they will never write that story. The only moral or lesson of that is no one is ever going to write the story of your success. You shouldn't expect it until it becomes conventional wisdom. They will write the negative story, the cynical story. There are endless negative stories forever. For whatever reason, our Bitcoin strategy failed when we were two billion, when we were five billion, when we were 15 billion, when we were 30 billion, when we were 60 billion. It keeps failing. There's never been a positive story ever. It will always be negative. So you kind of have to craft your own narrative and you have to have your own distribution channel for messages, because otherwise the Peter Schiffs of the world who will tell you Bitcoin is a failure at a dollar will basically have it fail at a dollar, $10, $100, $1,000, $10,000, $100,000. It's like if after you got 300 times or a thousand times as big, you're still failing, you'll never succeed. I really think I attribute that to the fact that conventional wisdom is everybody will determine that they will declare you a success without thinking about it when it's conventional, and they will declare you a failure without considering it when it's unconventional. The conventional wisdom that works against you on the way up will then work to support you once you push through that barrier. Probably the danger is believing any conventional wisdom because it probably causes you to become corrupted in time. But back to your other issue. Bitcoin was 120,000 eight months ago. It's 60,000 now. It's more compelling now. It's sitting around the 200-week moving average now. So there's a massive base of support right now, which means it makes a lot more sense for a risk-averse investor or any diversified investor that has a portion of their portfolio in gold, equity, real estate, credit, and Bitcoin to be moving their allocation back into Bitcoin now. So you'll see a reversal in the market. If it were to fall to 30,000, Bitcoin, the digital capital, would be trading at a discount to its book value, to its 200-week moving average. That would mean it would be oversold. You would definitely want to buy it then. It's even more compelling. The equities that are levered on it, like the Bitcoin equities, the strategy, the Strive, are even more compelling, and the credit instruments would be more compelling. If you look at Austrian economics and consider the free market is always going to adjust supply and demand, when things are underpriced, you're going to see a flow of capital into them. When they get overpriced, you see a flow of capital out of them. I don't endorse trading strategies because I think you can get burned by them. But there are a lot of people that don't agree with me in the market. You might be shocked. There are a number of people that won't agree with me in the market. So there are a lot of derivative traders who will trade Bitcoin when it's 2x the 200-week moving average and they would buy it when it's at the moving average or below. So you'll see a lot of capital flow into it. It's going to be self-stabilizing at the end of the day. The thing to keep your focus... I don't worry too much. I generally think if you look at the history of Bitcoin, it tends to trade to a premium, a big premium to the 200-week moving average during periods of leverage, and then it trades back toward the 200-week moving average. So if you're a four-year investor, look at the four years, plot that, look at the current spot price, and you can see where it is. I tend to look at the 200-week moving average as the book value of the network. It's the book value of Bitcoin. It's the amount of capital that's been invested on a basis in the asset. So it serves as a pretty good floor. I think that's important. Otherwise, if you look back to 2022, after the FTX crash and the crypto crash, there was a point when our stock fell from $120 up to $1,200, went up by a factor of 10, and then in a crash it fell all the way back to like $120 or $130. So we had a 90% drawdown. We had a massive amount of debt and a lot of Bitcoin. At that point, we had net leverage of 10%. Then we had net leverage of like 200% or something, a very large leverage number. I don't know if the number is 200%, but it was much higher than it is right now. We had like $2 billion of debt and $2 billion of Bitcoin, something like that. So it was very heavily leveraged, and that was the best time to buy the stock. People that bought that stock, the stock rallied 800% in the next cycle. So I think that like it or not, for better or for worse, 99.9% of the capital in the world is not invested in Bitcoin and is not invested in the Bitcoin derivatives, the equity and the credit. So if Bitcoin trades down, it just makes the equity, the credit, and the commodity that much more compelling. You'll have capital drawn in that will support it back up. And then you'll have an extraordinary amount of wealth created in the next bull run. The last point I'll make is it's very important to stay focused on the fundamentals, and the fundamentalists have this right. Bitcoin is economic empowerment, it is sovereign property rights for the world, and it is the dominant digital monetary network. This is a maximalist idea, a fundamentalist idea. If you look at Bitcoin dominance or crypto dominance over the past five years, Bitcoin was about 70% of crypto from 2015 to 2020. Then when you had peak leverage with FTX and all the offshore derivatives, Ethereum rallied, Solana rallied, FTX rallied, Dogecoin rallied, Terra Luna and all this crypto stuff, dominance fell to 40%. It was like 41% of all capital in the crypto capital market on a capital basis, not on a liquidity basis. If you look at the last five years, the percentage of Bitcoin versus the other crypto tokens, not including stablecoin, Bitcoin dominance has gone from 40% all the way up to about 68 to 70%. So nature is healing. Bitcoin has emerged as the dominant crypto capital, really the only crypto capital network, the crypto monetary network. No one seriously thinks that Ethereum is going to flip. The flipping did not come. There is no Ethereum flipping. No one thinks Solana, Ethereum, Sui, BNB, Ripple, any of the other tokens are going to supplant Bitcoin as digital money, as digital capital. It took us 17 years to get here. Our company had to invest $64 billion. The institutional investors invested hundreds of billions of dollars in 17 years to get here. And what we know is Bitcoin is the dominant global digital capital network. So what is that worth? It's got to be worth 10% of all the capital in the world. Even if only 10% of the capital wants to be digital, that's a hundred trillion dollars. So what does it matter if it trades at 30,000 or 60,000 or 90,000? It doesn't matter whether it's currently valued at a trillion or half a trillion or two trillion. The market need is a hundred trillion or more. There is no second best. There's no competitor. You can't create anything. It's just like when Google won, they won. When Facebook won, they won. When Apple won, they won. When Coca-Cola won, they won. When you end up with the monopoly in the space, the franchise, you're going to have periods of hysteria where there's a panic. During the panic, Coca-Cola stock or Apple stock or Amazon stock or Google stock or New York City real estate will be cheap. Then the panic will subside and people are like, what the heck was I thinking? Why didn't I buy that when of course the world's not ending? If the world doesn't end, then having a monopoly on something is a good idea. Bitcoin has the monopoly on digital money, the world is not ending, and no one's coming up with a better digital money. We know that. So this is just a trading opportunity. Bitcoin trades down, you should buy it. By the way, if you have no money, it doesn't matter because other people have more money than you and they like money and they will buy it and it will trade back up again.

It was clear in 2010 that there was no retailer in the world that could compete with Amazon. But it was only clear in 2020 that everybody needed Amazon. So a decade before the conventional wisdom or the consensus was that the world needs a company like Amazon, it was obvious to an independent thinker.

If I look back at my career, the first thing is you want to create a product. The world doesn't want 10,000 pages of a book. It doesn't really want you to talk at it for thousands of hours. It doesn't want to be educated. It just wants the answer. Everybody wants you to solve their problem. Give me the pill that makes me not fat. Give it to me. If it's like Ozempic or something, I want to be rich. I want to be not fat. I want the car to drive itself. If you could give me a teleporter beam, I would take it. Give me something that's very easy that I understand. The best businesses normally are just this really compelling product and service. The second observation I have is everything we ever did, we always looked at the new technology that everyone before you didn't have. If you want to create a business, it's not likely that you will create a business by using technology that's 30 years old or doing any business model or technique that your parents used to make money. That's probably off limits to you. So don't copy anything. Let me say it in a snarky way: don't do anything that was successful for someone older than you. If someone 10 years ahead of you or 20 years ahead of you did it, it probably won't work for you because the market is so competitive that once an idea clicks, it's like with classic rock and roll. All the really good classic rock and roll came from 1969 to 197 something. Why? Because we had the amplifier and the electric guitar, and within 10 years of having all the technology, human genius figures out the stuff. So all these good businesses when we were starting, what did I do? I used a Macintosh computer when nobody in business used Macintoshes. That was the new thing. Everybody with a suit and more money than me used an IBM computer or a mainframe or a mini computer. So we used the new thing. Then we created graphical interface software when everybody in the world used ASCII, no one used GUIs, and that was the new thing. Then we used the internet when nobody used the internet. Then we used mobile phones when nobody used mobile phones. As long as you're doing something that no one else ever succeeded at before, then maybe you have a chance to succeed. Whenever you're creating a business and you're saying, 'Well, look, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, they did it,' you're probably going to fail. If I was doing a business right now, I would say, 'What is new now? Digital assets, digital intelligence, digital communication.' Who is MrBeast? If you ask someone that's 20 years older than you who MrBeast is, they probably don't know. MrBeast created a new form of content on a new network that was inconceivable 15 years ago. Things that were inconceivable are generally good ideas. What you want is a business idea that's going to go viral, that's so cool that everyone will tell their friends they want that thing. There's a litany of them: Skype, WhatsApp, YouTube, and the like. There will always be more. That's my second piece of advice. My third piece of advice is if you come up with a really good idea, laser-like focus on the good idea. As soon as it's successful, assume that you have to work 10 times harder to keep it successful. This is the curse of the 30-something alpha male. It happens. I don't know how old you are, but here's the life cycle. It's not always this way, but it's the curse of the 30-year-old alpha female too. Women are just smarter than men most of the time, so they don't do what I'm about to describe. In your 20s, you actually want to start a business or do something, and then it takes a decade of struggle. If you're successful, you get there after about a decade, and then you declare victory and tell yourself you're a genius and you were born to be successful. Then you think about the next hill to climb. You think, 'Now that I've succeeded at this, I have to go do the next thing.' In my case, I was successful creating a business intelligence software company that was worth a billion dollars by my mid-30s. So then I came up with 10 more business ideas. I was going to launch strategy.com, alarm.com, angel.com, emma.com, wisdom.com, usher.com, alert.com. I'm not joking. These are all real businesses. I created about 10 of them. None of them worked as well as the first one. That's the mistake you make when you think the business was successful because I'm a genius and I was put on Earth to create these beautiful things, and I'm going to create 10 more. You might say, 'Well, Elon did it.' But one guy in a hundred years did it, and there are four billion other dudes and eight billion people on the planet. One person out of eight billion did it. You're fooled by randomness. You're not supposed to divine your wisdom by looking at the exception to the rule. What I have seen more often than not is it's hard to be successful, and people aren't successful because they try to do something that's been done before. They don't embrace all of the new technology. If you embrace new technology and think originally and come up with something that has never been done and do it in a way that could have never been done, you have a chance. If you focus, then maybe you succeed. After you succeed, nine out of 10 times the person that succeeded tells himself it was all them and they go off to do 10 more things and they utterly fail. In my case, I went off to do the other 10 things and I lost years when in fact I should have been invested in the core business. At the point that you create the billion-dollar success or the hundred million dollar success, you're at the most risky point in the business because your maintenance obligation is increasing exponentially. So what I would say is it's like the stoic idea: can you buy the boat? Yes, you can buy the boat. Can you afford to maintain the boat? Most people can't maintain it. And do you have a lifestyle to enjoy the boat? A hundred people buy the boat, 10 people can afford to keep it, and one person actually uses it. You go to any marina and there are 87,000 little boats sitting there. The equivalent in business is: can you create or buy the business or start the business? Yes. Can you actually run the business profitably and maintain it? Much harder. Can you grow the business while maintaining profitability faster than everybody else in the world? If you want to actually succeed, you have to run the business successfully and grow it faster than your competitor, because if you cash cow or harvest the business, they will outgrow you and bury you. Most people think the joy is in the getting. Have you ever heard people say, 'I just like to get these things started and then go to the next thing'? That's not a good recipe for business success. You have to say, 'I'm going to do this, devote my life to this. I'm going to make it continuously better in every way than anyone else that chooses to compete with me in this niche forever.' People underestimate the maintenance obligation. It's 10 times harder to maintain the business than it is to get into it. It's a hundred times harder to prosper, to enjoy the business while growing it. People just underinvest in the relationship. That's my last piece of advice: laser focus, commit, marry it. Every iota of your thinking and energy ought to be how do I make this thing better? That would be virtuous. The scourge of all businesses is dilutive distractions. My joke is I don't regret my bad ideas because no one's stupid enough to focus on commercializing bad ideas. I regret my good ideas because after you've had one success, you have 10 more good ideas. You have to ask yourself, is this dilutive and distracting to my great idea? Most of the time in business, if I live to see one, there were 100 companies in the business intelligence space. 99 out of a hundred went out of business or failed or got amalgamated. Every one of them failed because they got distracted and diluted. They did dilutive acquisitions. They strayed. They lost focus, they lost intensity, they didn't have the endurance. Business oftentimes is just this commitment to endurance. How many people put laser eyes on five years ago? I did. A lot of other people did. I think 95% of them took the laser eyes off. I still have laser eyes. I make a joke: it's time to put the laser eyes back on. A lot of people don't realize that I never took them off. They say, 'Oh, Saylor put the laser eyes back on.' No, the whole point is I stayed focused on the same thing every day for the last six years straight. People think somehow you got lucky. The irony is everybody that was in this business before me, everybody that was in the Bitcoin business before me, they never put the laser eyes on. They took the laser eyes off and got distracted and went off to work on one of 18 other things. Success in business is not that complicated. Whoever wants it the most gets up every single day and thinks morning, noon, and night about how they're going to serve the customer or how they're going to further the business is most likely to win. I'll make one last point. There are eight billion people on the planet. That means if you're the smartest person out of a thousand people in your school, there are eight million people as smart as you. When you divide a thousand into eight billion, there are eight million hyper geniuses. If you were one in a thousand, there are eight million people you're competing against. If you were one in 10,000, there are 800,000 people you're competing with. If you were the smartest person in a hundred thousand, there are 80,000 people you're competing with. There are not 80,000 good businesses. So you think you're smart and you work hard. It's not enough because there's someone that's a hyper genius that has nothing that wants it. If you are lucky enough to be in a business, you just have to say to yourself, there is a person that is the smartest person in their entire city that has nothing, that's younger than me, that's got nothing to lose, that's got everything to gain. They're going to go 80 hours a week. When I left MIT, I worked 70 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. That's 3,500 hours a year for 10 years straight to get to the point where the business was successful. People asked me about this and said that was really easy compared to MIT. That was easy. MIT was so much harder than working 70 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. MIT was so hard that on Friday night we'd walk past the geek dorm and they'd have the lights on and we hated them because they were working for the three hours between 6 and 9 on Friday night. Those were the only three or four hours we took off the entire week. We hated them because we worked Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 16 hours a day. We took four hours off and the geeks were working those four hours. My point is, however successful you are, there's a guy smarter than you, younger than you, with nothing that wants what you have. They're going to stare at you and say you're fat, dumb, and happy and they want it. You're going to tell yourself that somehow God put you on earth and made you smart and you don't have to work as hard. Wrong. You have to work insanely hard to hold your position in a market of eight billion people that want what you have and have nothing to lose and can take more risk to get it.

If I was starting a new business right now, you would definitely want to do something with digital intelligence or digital assets or digital something, especially if you didn't spend much capital. I'm not an expert on bioengineering and pharmaceuticals, and there are a lot of other areas where people are in business. But given the fact that we're in the digital asset space and you're at a Bitcoin conference, the obvious thing to do is to combine AI with digital assets. If I wanted to make a billion dollars right now starting from nothing, if I'm sitting with my best friend or three people around a table saying, 'How do we create a billion-dollar business?' I would think I want to create some kind of digital money or digital yield type instrument based upon digital credit based on digital capital. Bitcoin is digital capital. Digital credit takes a 40x asset and strips it down to 4x and takes a 30 or 40% return and turns it into 10% return. But the real incredible opportunity, and I'll discuss this in my keynote tomorrow, is there are so many thousands of opportunities to create digital money and digital yield. The first company that creates a Swiss bank account that pays you 6% in Swiss Francs... What do people want? They want risk-free return. They want to be not fat. They want to live forever. They want a robot to do all the work. They want the car to drive us. And they want to be rich. And they want to do it without stress.

Anxiety, no risk. And I want someone else to do it for me. And the great products. I mean, literally, it's like, oh yeah, that thing I inject and it makes me not fat. Just get what's in it. Just give it to me. Click. It's like, give me that thing, right? And so if we just focus upon finance, I would just say people would just like to get rich comfortably with no risk. And so if you go to Japan and you offer people digital money that pays them 6% in yen, no currency risk, no market risk, no volatility. If you go to Europe and offer people six or eight percent euro accounts, I say this to large companies. I'm like, here's your website. Your website ought to be you can either have 6%, 12%, or 18% yield in Swiss Francs, euros or dollars. Just click. Everybody wants to do complicated stuff, but I just think, okay, how do you create 18% yield in euros? Start with 11% yield in USD. Convert the currency to euros with currency hedge. Borrow the money at two, three or 4% interest. Loop it three times. Generate 30 plus percent yield. Keep 5% for the volatility and currency hedge. Pass the rest through to the customer. If you want, give them a one-month lock up or give them a three-month lock up. Do you want 24%? You got to hold the money in for three months. Yeah. Everybody comes up with complicated ideas. But by the way, all those other things, they were brilliant and sophisticated and they had like a hundred features and they all failed. It's because people come up with complicated ideas with lots of moving parts. And the one thing you learn in life is just a simple idea. The first bank in the UK that gives people 8% yield in great British pounds with no volatility. Like who wants that? Everybody wants that. What if you're a saver you want 8% no risk no volatility because you're getting right now 3%. If you're an investor you want 16%. Maybe you'll agree to lock up the money for three months, pay me double. Maybe I want 24%, pay me triple. How do you do it? It's simple. Go to an AI and say, I want to take stretch and I want to create zero volatility, 20% yield. How much leverage do I need? What's the cost of capital? How do I do it? Can I wrap it into a public fund, a private fund, a bank account, a token? I would figure that out. Why do I think it's a big opportunity? Because you can create digital money in every jurisdiction, in every currency, at every... there are a lot of flavors of volatility and liquidity preferences. You can wrap it in different ways. The AI will show you how to build it. And it's kind of tongue in cheek, but it's serious. How do you make money? Make the money. Like literally make... who made the most money in the last thousand years? The people that made the money, the goldsmiths, right? The bankers. The bankers make the money. If I have a bunch of gold and I start issuing gold back credit notes and then pretty soon you've got a billion dollars of gold and you issue $2 billion of gold back credit notes, you just created a billion dollars out of thin air. Just making the money. What we're doing is creating credit money with STRC. Strive is creating credit money with SATA, but it's volatile. It's got a five volatility and volatility is a challenge. It decreases the appeal. The third layer, true nonvolatile digital asset. It's like peg it to a currency, the yen, the CNY, the euro, the Swiss Franc, whatever. Peg it to the currency. No volatility. Decide how much liquidity you want to offer, decide how much yield you want to offer and just go sell it and keep a 100 or 200 basis points or 300 basis points. That's what I would do if I was working a business. That's my best idea. But there's a ton of other ideas like a robot that does everything that you want that costs $20,000 a year. Who wants it? Everybody wants it. You'll sell a billion of them. The question is, can you create a robot that works? It's clearly worth 10 trillion dollars to Nvidia or to Tesla. Will they try? They will definitely try. Maybe Apple will do it. I don't know. So, there's a lot of miracle drugs. There's a lot of miracle devices. I would just leave you with the thought that Elon Musk has this quote, he said the biggest mistake that engineers make is improving a part that shouldn't exist or improving a function that shouldn't exist.

Like what is the ideal product? A product with no moving parts. It's like I have this watch and you put it on your wrist or like your little orange bands. If I put the orange band on my wrist and I become indestructible because I got a force field and nothing can hurt me. That's the product people want, right? The personal force field. Or how about the one where it just prevents you from getting sick, aging, dying, or being hurt? Well, how many moving parts? None. Do you want to buy that? Of course you do. And you know what's an example of that? Any product that you buy once in your life that works forever. An insurance policy. It's like I bought the insurance policy. Well, what does it do? Actually, kind of nothing. But somehow I pay for it and the insurance company sits back and collects money forever, right? And is there any user error? It's impossible to have user error. It's just I bought it. The whole idea of digital credit is, well, how does it work? Well, you buy a share for $100, it pays you forever. Well, what do I have to do after I bought it? It took 10 seconds, and what do I do for the next hundred years? Nothing. So the real appeal of digital intelligence in my opinion is there are a lot of things in the world that have a lot of moving parts and they're gadgety like the phones that have buttons and everything has a lot of parts. We're getting to the point where you can just get rid of all the parts and just have the thing do the thing. If you put the glasses on and the glasses look all around you and the glasses internalize everything and the glasses answered the question. How many people are sitting in the room right now? 497. It's like I just want instantaneous, frictionless. It's better. How many people in the room right now? 497. Okay, send them all a bitcoin. Okay, done. Like instant frictionless empowerment. Those products will go viral. They're not necessarily easy to build, but some of them are. There are a lot of products. One thing I note, the reason that we were successful in business intelligence is we created systems that would scan full relational databases and they would give you analytics against billions and hundreds of billions of records answering questions with a sophisticated relational calculus. And if you needed it, like you work in market research, you know that you needed it or you're a bank credit manager. So, the customers knew they needed it, but all of the competitors we had didn't think it was a good idea. It's a product that your customer needs or what I joke is it's something everybody needs, nobody can stop, but nobody understands. I used to joke I could bring all of our competitors into a conference room, I could lecture them for eight hours on what our product did, explain it in minute detail, and they would look at me at the end of the eight hours and say, that's a bad idea. Why would anybody want that? It's not a question of keeping the idea secret. Literally, everybody that looked at it would have said, I'm not going to do that. And by the way, our business today is exactly that. I can literally say we're creating digital credit on top of digital capital to give people digital money to slurp up $30 trillion of capital. And we can basically generate $20 billion of income with 12 people in a year. And everybody's like, well, why would you want to do that? That's stupid. That'll never work. We had a $500 million company and now we're 80 billion and people are telling me online every day of my life, you're stupid.

I'm like, wait, we made like $80 billion dollars but you're stupid. Why would you want to? Bitcoin went from 150 billion to a trillion? That's stupid.

They use a new technology and they have a new... we're creating credit money. When's the last time you did it? Well, the gold people did it 300 years ago. No one did it in the last hundred years. Okay, you're stupid. It's not unprecedented. It's just you haven't seen it in your life. But that doesn't mean that it isn't. STRC is the first dividend bearing stock that had a variable credit spread. That's stupid. There's 25,000 dividend bearing stocks that are more volatile that have a fixed credit spread. It's just, well, why'd you do it? Well, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. So, I really think the killer businesses and I think Peter Thiel says this a lot. He's like the best businesses are these businesses that no one ever conceived of. It's like that's stupid. That's impossible. Why would you do that? And of course the ironic ones are the ones where even five years after you've done it, people still think it's a stupid idea. Apple was like that with the iPhone. People thought it wasn't going to work five years after they did it. Amazon for a decade after Amazon was doing home delivery. Everybody on Wall Street said that's a stupid business. They'll never make money on that. Doesn't make sense. With streaming video and Netflix, they said the same thing about it. So what you want is to do something which is truly innovative that your parents never could have done. And if conventional wisdom is you're out of your mind, then it might work. And the question really is, how do you get five years or 10 years so that you can actually build a franchise without getting copied by people with more money and power and talent? You do something that they're so afraid of that they recoil in horror. Like if you want to copy us, take a hundred billion dollars, buy a hundred billion dollars of Bitcoin, take the company public, and then sell the credit instrument. It's like, are you kidding? I've tried to convince companies to buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin for six years. You know how hard it is to get anybody to buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin? Insanely difficult. And so we just go do something that requires like a hundred billion dollars. So because they think you're just so crazy, they're not going to chase after you. And because they're not going to chase after you, you get to go from being the small player with none of the assets in the space to being the bigger player because you had the courage and the clarity and the conviction to go to some place nobody's gone before. Cars will never drive themselves. That's crazy. Oops. It looks like they're going to drive themselves. You just have to go somewhere that's a good place where customers will be happy that they want that magic product and you just have to have the courage to go there. And if you go there the first three years, they can still crush you. Like people could still come in with more capital if they wanted, but if it's novel enough, you could literally go on television, describe to everybody in the world what you're doing, and they'll be like, you're crazy. We're not doing that. And that's why you'll be successful. You just want to be right.

So why did we sell 32 Bitcoin? We sell 32 Bitcoin because over the course of a year, if we're able to sell Bitcoin to fund the dividends on the credit, the credit becomes more creditworthy. If we're able to sell the Bitcoin to actually support the equity, the equity premium expands. If we take the position that we will never sell the Bitcoin, then we end up with $60 billion of an impaired asset. And if we impair our own asset, it gets marked to zero by the credit rating agencies and it gets marked to zero by the credit investors. If I literally said to you, I promise to never sell Bitcoin, then the short sellers of the stock would say, he's basically got to sell the stock, and so I can sell the stock with impunity, even if it trades at a 95% discount to NAV. And that means they would short the stock to $1 a share. And if the short sellers thought they could do that without fear, then they would allocate a hundred billion dollars of capital to do it. And if they did it, then my long equity investors would say, why do we want to hold a stock that's going to a dollar a share? We'll just sell it. And so the equity investors and the equity capital markets would walk away from MSTR if I refuse to defend the stock. It's like, what if I said to you, is it okay if I steal all of your Bitcoin and will you just give it to me without a fight? And you said, nah, that's fine. I won't fight. Then we would just take your stuff. And so if we refuse to defend our equity, then the equity will go to zero. If the equity goes to zero, then I can't sell equity to pay the dividend. If I promise not to sell the Bitcoin to pay the dividend, and I won't sell the equity to pay the dividend, then the people holding the credit instrument won't get paid. The credit will go to zero. I can't sell the credit. So another way to say it is if I'm unwilling to use my capital in order to support the credit dividend or to defend the equity, the credit and the equity markets will abandon the company. If the credit market abandons the company, then the business can't generate a Bitcoin gain. If I sell 10 billion dollars of credit, we make 10 billion a year or 20 billion a year. If the equity market thinks I can continue to do that for a decade, they can value the company at $200 billion, then I can sell 50 billion of equity, then I can sell another hundred billion of credit. Then I can buy 300 billion dollars of Bitcoin. Then the Bitcoin goes to a million a coin. So it's pretty obvious why you want the credit to work. It's pretty obvious why you want the equity to work. And so if I didn't buy 20 billion dollars of Bitcoin each year, would that be worse than selling 32 Bitcoin a year? It's like yeah. Another way to say it is we're generally in a situation where we have to show that we'll defend the credit and we'll defend the equity in order to achieve the confidence of the credit investors and the equity investors. If all we did was say we're going to never sell Bitcoin, the equity would collapse, the credit would collapse, and the company would stop raising any capital. And instead of buying $25 billion of Bitcoin a year, we would buy zero dollars of Bitcoin a year. And so if that happens for 10 years in a row and we stop growing 30%, that means instead of buying $500 billion of Bitcoin over the next 10 years, we'll buy zero dollars of Bitcoin. And that means the price of Bitcoin will be 70,000 instead of 700,000. So what's best for Bitcoin? Clearly for us to make it go to a million a coin. And we can't make it go to a million a coin without money. The war to determine the future of money is going to be fought and won with money. So we need capital from the credit markets and the equity markets. You have to respect the credit markets and the equity markets. So the logical thing for a company to do is you sell a billion of credit, you buy a billion of Bitcoin, you invest it, the Bitcoin appreciates, and then if it's in the best interest of the company to sell the equity at a premium to the Bitcoin to pay the credit dividend, that's what you do. And if it's in the best interest of the company to sell highly appreciated Bitcoin to pay the credit dividend, that's what you do. And why would I not give this advice to you as the retail investor or the individual? It's like you're not running a public company selling credit instruments and managing tax obligations and equity investors. If you're a family or an individual, don't sell your Bitcoin. Keep the Bitcoin unless you're going to go... I get that. There are eight billion people, by the way, to myself. I haven't sold my Bitcoin. I'm not selling my own Bitcoin. But the point is, I'm not issuing credit instruments with a dividend that gets paid twice a month to credit investors with the S&P credit rating agency recommending to insurance companies, endowments, and hedge funds whether they should buy the credit. And so a corporation ought to manage its operations to the benefit of its shareholders because that way it can raise capital. And if the purpose of the company is to buy Bitcoin and if the money is coming from credit investors and equity investors, then you have to give them what they want. And what the credit investors want is they want to know that we're able to sell Bitcoin to pay the credit dividend. Otherwise, their credit's worthless. And what the equity investors want to know is that the credit investors trust us. And the credit investors want to buy the credit. Otherwise, the equity doesn't trade at a premium. And also, the equity investors want the credit business to work. And the equity investors also want us to protect them against the short sellers. If a short seller were to short my stock to a dollar and if I could sell a thousand Bitcoin, buy the stock back, bankrupt the short seller, and then make all the equity investors rich. And I refused to do it because a troll on Twitter said, you should never sell your Bitcoin. Like, okay, fine. I'll destroy a hundred billion dollar company so that I don't sell my Bitcoin. The point is I said to you never sell your Bitcoin. I never said that the company wouldn't sell its Bitcoin. And anybody that's been listening to our earnings calls or reading our disclosures or has half a brain knows for the last five years, we've been very clear that of course we sell the Bitcoin if we have to as fiduciaries. So this entire thing is really just a Twitter trolling exercise because if you're a Twitter troll, it's very convenient to say, you said never sell the Bitcoin. And then you sold some. And that's very interesting. And it's not very interesting to have a discussion about how you sell a hundred billion dollars worth of digital credit or a trillion dollars worth of digital credit and create a multi-trillion dollar publicly traded treasury company. That is not in their wheelhouse. They're not going to get at that. But I guarantee you that if you created a gold treasury company and you invested a hundred billion dollars of gold and you issued gold back credit and then you told everybody you would never sell the gold to pay the dividend, no one would buy the credit. And if you have an equity capital company and you issue credit against it, if you went to your bank and you said, I want to borrow a million and I'll pledge a $10 million equity portfolio, but I'm unwilling to sell the equity to pay back the debt if you ask for it. They wouldn't give you the loan. And it's kind of common sense. If you went to the bank and said, I would like a million dollars to buy a house, but I'm not willing to mortgage the house. I'm not willing to pledge the house as collateral. Just give me the money. You wouldn't get the money. And so this is not controversial with anybody who's a rational investor or a thoughtful person. Everybody knows you have to pledge the collateral in order to get the credit. And if the business is issuing the credit and it's unwilling to pledge collateral or use the collateral to back the credit, the business is worthless. And if the business is worthless, we can't be the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. And so what we're doing is good for Bitcoin, good for the credit, good for the credit markets, good for the equity markets, good for the capital markets. It simply requires that you hold multiple complex ideas in your head at the same time.

I just don't see how it could be. By the way, how much Bitcoin has BlackRock sold in the past three months? Like do you know for every bitcoin we sold, other actors in the market have sold a thousand? Actually 200x. So in the middle of a bear market, Bitcoin crashed from 120,000 to 60,000 and we sold 32 bitcoin. At the same time we bought about 250,000 bitcoin. So in the middle of the bear market, we have bought net 250,000 bitcoin. In what way are we at systemic risk? In fact, we're the ones that are keeping the market from crashing more. We're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin this year. So we're not a risk to the market. We're actually a shock absorber to the market. Our equity and our credit is keeping Bitcoin from crashing from 120,000 to 30,000. If we weren't here in the market, what do you think would happen if we basically sold 250,000 Bitcoin right now to the other investors? If we had actually dumped 250,000 Bitcoin, the people that dumped 75,000 Bitcoin out of BlackRock would have sold another 75,000. The market would be sitting at 20,000. And so, no, we're not a systemic risk. We're a systemic source of power and robustness. We are a supporting structure for the market right now. Our company is damping the volatility and creating the liquidity, holding the price. We spent $64 billion in five years. What if we hadn't spent 64 billion? If we hadn't spent the 64 billion, you think the people at the ETFs would have spent a hundred billion? Because by the way, you know who was buying the ETFs? A lot of them were the hedge funds shorting our stock. So there were people shorting 25 billion of MSTR and buying 25 billion of IBIT as the pair trade. So in fact what we've been doing is attracting derivative capital, credit capital, equity capital, commodity capital and we're always counter-trading the market. We're always buying when other people are selling. When no one else would buy, we're the ones that are buying. When the market is overvalued, when Bitcoin is trading 120,000, we're buying. We're actually the ones that are creating the liquidity. So economically I don't think we're a systemic risk. I think we're a systemic asset to the market. Politically, we're the ones that got fair value accounting for Bitcoin. Without it, no public or private company on the GAAP standard could even buy it. And so, we're actually advocating to fix the accounting. We're fixing the credit. We're fixing the tax. We're the ones advocating to avoid an unrealized capital gains tax on Bitcoin for institutional holders. We're the ones standing between the Bitcoin community and any powerful politician that might decide just to pass a law depriving you of the right to have it. And we're not the only ones. Coinbase is fighting that fight. BlackRock is fighting that fight. But at the end of the day, in China, by the way, we're not in China. China makes it illegal to buy Bitcoin or sell it in China. There's no BlackRock or Strategy in China. So what happens when someone that doesn't like you puts a one paragraph piece of language in the next appropriations bill that makes it illegal for you to own Bitcoin or hold your private keys or taxes it at 20% unrealized gains or just takes it away from you? Who do you think's going to fix that problem? And the answer is a large publicly traded company, whether it's Coinbase, whether it's BlackRock, whether it's Strategy, whether it's Fidelity, not public, maybe it's going to be a bank Morgan Stanley or Charles Schwab that has a Bitcoin related business. They're going to pick up the phone, call a senator, and say, this is an unfair, inappropriate, ill-advised measure. Please fix this. And it's not going to be a Bitcoin fundamentalist. It's not going to be a crypto anarchist. It's not going to be a nim on Twitter that is tweeting from an account that's XXY something something, Satoshi was here. They're not going to provide that political protection, the economic protection. You know who actually paid in order to defend the community and the Bitcoin devs against Craig Wright's lawsuits? Us. Block, you know. To give full credit, Jack Dorsey Square Block led that, it was a COPA initiative. But the people that are putting up the money, our Coinbase, our Strategy, our Block, there are these publicly traded companies that are actually funding the legal advocacy, the political advocacy, the accounting advocacy, the tax advocacy, and the economic advocacy. Why do you think those banks are actually allowing you to buy Bitcoin or allowing anybody to buy Bitcoin? It's like we're the ones going to Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan and Citi and Bank of America and Charles Schwab, and fill in the blank. Every one of those is a corporation that's on the Bitcoin standard or supports Bitcoin. And they're all fighting in order to legitimize Bitcoin as an asset. And so, if you're a fundamentalist or an anarchist and you just hate corporations and you hate banks and you hate anybody that wears a suit, well, when the suit coiners disappear, it's going to be illegal for you to actually own, trade, custody Bitcoin. And if you think it doesn't happen, go to Cuba, go to North Korea, go to China. And then make all of your arguments there and see how it works out. We have a free capitalist system because there are advocates that are fighting every day in every venue. We're fighting in mainstream media. We're fighting on Capitol Hill. We're fighting in the court systems. There's a lawsuit in New York, you might have read, where someone wants to basically seize all of Satoshi's wallets as unclaimed property to the city of New York. It's not an anonymous crypto anarchist on Twitter that's going to pay to actually fight that lawsuit and go to the mayor of New York and go to the circuit court and appeal up to the Supreme Court to fight those things. Those are suit coiners. They're corporations that are doing that. So, no, I do not accept for one moment the fact that we're a systemic risk. We are simply the extension of the Bitcoin network into the entire free market system. And what you ought to hope for is that millions of companies, hundreds of countries, thousands of municipalities, hundreds of thousands of institutions all adopt Bitcoin because they're the ones that are going to legitimize the asset, commercialize the asset, and defend the asset against your enemies. So when someone decides they just want to put an unrealized capital gains tax of 100% on Bitcoin because they're mad at something that somebody on Bitcoin Twitter said, you're not going to tweet back at them. Tweeting at people is not a way to defend your rights. Trust me, that's not the way it works. You're literally going to have to resort to political or legal or economic means. And that means you're going to need people that don't reject legal power, political activity, and economic activity as a means to succeed in this world.