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 a thousand times, actually 2,000 times. 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?

Yeah. Before I answer that, I'll just say one funny thing, which is in six years, our company went from an enterprise value of 600 million to an enterprise value of, you know, 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're like, '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 like when we had two billion of Bitcoin. And then when we got to the point where we had 50 billion of Bitcoin, you know, I guess two weeks, three weeks ago, right, Bitcoin traded from 82,000 to 62,000. So we have a $16 billion mark-to-market loss. And so the story is, you know, 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... And so, yeah. 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. And 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's like 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. And so you kind of have to craft your own narrative and you have to have your own distribution channel for messages because otherwise, you know, the Peter Schiffs of the world that 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 know, you'll never succeed, right? And 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. And the conventional wisdom that works against you on the way up will then work to support you once you push through that barrier. And probably the danger is believing any conventional wisdom because it probably is what causes you to become corrupted in time. But back to your other issue. So 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 that it makes a lot more sense for a risk-averse investor or any kind of diversified investor that has a portion of their portfolio in gold, equity, real estate, credit, and Bitcoin. It makes more sense for them to be moving their allocation back into Bitcoin now. And 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 that 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 strives are even more compelling, and the credit instruments would be more compelling. And if you look at Austrian economics and you consider it's like the free market is always going to adjust supply and demand. So when the 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 just because I think you can get burned by them. But you know, 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. And so there are a lot of derivative traders, you know, people that will trade Bitcoin and they would trade it when it's 2x the 200-week moving average and they would buy it when it's at the moving average or below the moving average. And so you'll see a lot of capital will 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, you know. And 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. And I tend to look at the 200-week moving average as like 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. And then, you know, otherwise, if you look back to 2022, you know, after the FTX crash and the crypto crash, there was a point when our stock, I guess it fell, it went from $120 up to $1,200. It 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 we had a lot of Bitcoin. And so at that point, we were like, you know, right now we had net leverage of 10%, then we had net leverage of like 200% or something, a very large leverage number. Yeah, is that maybe... 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 know, 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. You know, Bitcoin is economic empowerment and it is sovereign property rights for the world and it is the dominant digital monetary network. Right? This is a maximalist idea. It's a fundamentalist idea. And if you look at Bitcoin dominance or crypto dominance over the past five years, Bitcoin was, you know, in the years from like 2015 to 2020, it was like 70% of crypto. And then when you had peak leverage with peak FTX and all the offshore derivatives, it, you know, Ethereum rallied, Solana rallied, FTX rallied. There was Dogecoin rallied. There was 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. And if you look at the last five years, if you look at 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, right? No one seriously thinks that Ethereum is going to flip. The flipping did not come, right. There is no Ethereum flipping. No one thinks Solana, Ethereum, Sui, BNB, Ripple, any of the other tokens. No one thinks any of them are going to supplant Bitcoin as digital money, as digital capital. And it took us 17 years to get here. You know, our company had to invest $64 billion, right? And the institutional investors invested hundreds of billions, 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, then that's a hundred trillion dollars. And so what does it matter if it trades 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. And so 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, you know, where there's a panic and then during the panic, Coca-Cola stock or Apple stock or Amazon stock or Google stock or New York City real estate will be cheap and then the panic will subside and people are like, what the heck was I thinking? I mean, why didn't I buy that when of course the world's not ending? And if the world doesn't end, then I guess having a monopoly on something is a good idea. And so Bitcoin's got the monopoly on digital money, the world is not ending. And no one's coming up with a better digital money. And we know that. So this is just a trading opportunity. Bitcoin trades down, you should buy it, you know. And 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. Yeah, it was clear. But it was only clear in 2020 that everybody needed Amazon. So a decade before the conventional wisdom or the consensus was the world needs a company like Amazon, it was obvious to an independent thinker.

So I guess 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. So everybody wants you to solve their problem. It's either give me the pill like this makes me not fat. Give it to me. Right? 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. You know, give me something that's very easy that I understand. So the best businesses normally are just this really compelling product and service. The second observation I have is everything we ever did, it's always look at the new technology that everyone that came before you didn't have. So 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 any technique that your parents used to make money is 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. Right? 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 just 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 like 1969 to 197 something. Sorry if you like 80s stuff, but it's like why? Because we had the amplifier and we had the electric guitar and within 10 years of having all the technology, human genius figures out the stuff. So I think that all these good businesses when we were starting, what did I do? I used a Macintosh computer when nobody in business used Macintoshes. So that was like 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 and then we created graphical interface software when everybody in the world used ASCII, no one used GUIs, and that was the new thing. And then we used the internet when nobody used the internet, and then we used mobile phones when nobody used mobile phones. So as long as you're doing something that no one else ever succeeded at before, then maybe you have a chance to succeed. And 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. So if I was doing a business right now, I would say, 'Well, what is new now? Digital assets, digital intelligence, digital communication.' Right? Like, who is Mr. Beast? By the way, if you ask someone that's 20 years older than you, who is Mr. Beast, they probably don't know, right? Because Mr. Beast created a new form of content on a new network that was inconceivable 15 years ago. So 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 that they want that thing, right? And there's a litany of them, whether it's Skype or WhatsApp or YouTube or the like. And 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 and then as soon as it's successful, assume that you have to work 10 times harder to keep it successful because this is the curse of the 30-something alpha male. This happens, I don't know how old you are, but...

But here's the life cycle. It's not always this way, but I'm not saying it isn't the curse of the 30-year-old alpha female because it's the curse of the 30-year-old alpha female, too. It's just women are smarter than men most of the time, and so they don't do what I'm about to describe to you. In your 20s, you actually want to start a business or you do something and then it takes a decade of struggle. And then if you're successful, by the way, a lot of people aren't successful, but if you're successful, you get there after about a decade and then you declare victory and you tell yourself you're a genius and you were born to be successful and then you think about what's the next hill to climb and you're like, well, now that I've succeeded at this, I have to go do the next thing. Like now that I've succeeded at this, I have to launch a second. So 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. And then I was like, I'm going to launch strategy.com, alarm.com, angel.com, emma.com, wisdom.com, usher.com, alert... I'm not joking. These are all real businesses. I created like about 10 of them. None of them worked as well as the first one. But it's the mistake you make when you think, well, 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. And of course, you're going to say, well, Elon did it. Well, you're like, one guy in a hundred years did it and there's four billion other dudes and eight billion people on the planet. So one person out of eight billion people did it. You're not... That's a fooled by randomness issue. You're not supposed to actually 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 you think originally and you come up with something which 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. And 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 because at the point that you create the billion-dollar success or the hundred million, $100 million is very successful, a billion is very successful. At the point that you create that 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 then do you have a lifestyle to enjoy the boat? So 100 people buy the boat, 10 people, you know, 90 people run out of money and they can't maintain it, like give the boat back. And so 10 people can afford to keep the boat and one person actually finds that they actually use the boat. And you go to any marina and there's like 87,000 little boats that are sitting there. The equivalent in business is: can you create or buy the business or start the business? Yeah. 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. And so 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'? Okay, that's not a good recipe for business success because 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.' And that's another way of saying people underestimate the maintenance obligation. It's 10 times harder to maintain the business than it is to get into it. And it's a hundred times harder to prosper, to enjoy the business while growing it. And people just underinvest in the relationship. And so that's my last piece of advice. Laser focus, commit, marry it, and every iota of your thinking and energy ought to be how do I make this thing better? That would be virtuous. And the scourge of all businesses is dilutive distractions. It's like 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. And you have to ask yourself the question: is this dilutive and distracting to my great idea? And I think 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. And so business oftentimes is just this commitment to endurance. And yeah, you know, like how many people put laser eyes on, right, like five years ago?

Yeah.

No, I mean, the whole point is I said and focused on the same thing every day for the last six years straight.

Like that was easy. MIT was so much harder than working 70 hours a week 50 weeks a year. It was so much harder. Like 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 we're like those people are working for the three hours between 6 and 10:00 or 6 and 9:00 on Friday night. And those were the only three or four hours we took off the entire week. And we hated them because we worked Saturday, we worked Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. 16 hours a day. We took four hours off and the geeks were working, the nerds were working those four hours that we hated them. Okay? And my point to you is however successful you are, there's a guy smarter than you, younger than you, nothing that has nothing that wants what you have. And they're going to stare at you and they're going to say you're fat, dumb, and happy and they want it. And 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 8 billion people that want what you have and have nothing to lose and can take more risk to get to it.

You know, 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 that much capital. I'm not an expert on bioengineering and pharmaceuticals and there's a lot of other areas where people are in business. But I think that 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. So 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. Like 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... What do people want? We want to be not fat. We want to live forever. We want a robot to do all the work. We want the car to drive us, right? And we want to be rich. And we want to do it without stress, no anxiety, no risk. And I want someone else to do it for me. Okay. 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+% 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. 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 to do it. Go to an AI and say, 'I want to take Strive 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-backed credit notes and then pretty soon you've got a billion dollars of gold and you issue $2 billion of gold-backed 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 STRK. Strive is creating credit money with SAT, but it's volatile. It's got a 5x volatility and volatility is a challenge. It decreases the appeal. The third layer, true non-volatile 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, right? That's what I would do if I was working a business. That's my best idea. But you know, 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, you know, and he said the biggest mistake that engineers make is improving a part that shouldn't exist or improving a function that shouldn't exist.

And so the best ideas are ones that are innovative enough. 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. You know, STRK 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, you know, 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. And 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 like 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. You know, so what you want is you want 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, well, 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? By the way, 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. And 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 know, 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, I think. To agree with you, 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 that 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, right? 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, right? 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. Or 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 you can't make it go to a million a coin without money. Right? I say the war to determine the future of money is going to be fought and won with money, right? 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 you know, 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, you know, 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... You know, I get that. There are eight billion people, by the way, to myself. You know, 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, right? 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.' Well, 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, 'Hi, 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, right? 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-backed 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 then 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. It's like 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.

Yeah. 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 times, actually 2,000 times. So in the middle of a bear market, you know, Bitcoin crashed from 120,000 to 60,000 and we sold 32 Bitcoin. And 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 or something. In what way are we at systemic risk? Right. 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. Right? If we weren't here in the market, you would see... 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. Right? 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, right? 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 at 120,000, we're buying, right? 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, you know, 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, right? 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, right? 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. Right? So, and we're not the only ones, right? I mean, 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, right? 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 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.' Right? 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, you know, Satoshi was here, right? They're not going to provide that political protection, the economic protection. Yeah. You know who actually paid in order to defend the community and the Bitcoin devs against Craig Wright's lawsuits? Us. Block, you know. Yeah. I mean, by the way, to give full credit, right? I mean Jack Dorsey, Square, Block, you know, led that 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, right, and the economic advocacy. We're the... 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, right? 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, you know, 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 suitcoiners disappear, it's going to be illegal for you to actually own, trade, custody Bitcoin, right? And if you think it doesn't happen, go to Cuba, go to North Korea, go to China, right? 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. You know, it's like someone wants to... 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, right? 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 suitcoiners. 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, right? You're not going to tweet back at them, right? I mean, 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.