#161 with Michael Saylor - Why Michael Saylor Believes Bitcoin is Hope

for everyone. 7.8 billion people, for 100 million companies, for everyone with money on Earth, and everyone that earns a salary on Earth. This is the big idea of the podcast. You have to— I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

What's up, everybody? We got a special guest in the house, Michael Saylor.

The—

have you heard the nickname they give you on YouTube? The GigaChad? Have you seen this one?

I might have heard it once or twice.

So, Michael, go ahead.

I was gonna ask you, Sam, have you heard this nickname that they give— that they gave Michael Saylor? The crypto community, you know, sort of giveth and taketh away. You know, they are extremely passionate and devoted, but they are also, you know, just nuts online. Like my My Twitter mentions are unusable now. I'm sure Michael's are the same, just because of that group. But they are funny also. So they nicknamed him the Gigachad, because he is sort of like, probably the most credible established person and company with MicroStrategy to adopt Bitcoin in a major, major way, and really is driving the kind of institutional pickup of it. So if you're listening to this, you never heard of Michael Saylor. The reason to listen to this is pretty interesting guy, had a really interesting career, but most notably, most known now for basically using his company MicroStrategy and buying about $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, or they own $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, bought about, I don't know, how much you guys put in, half a billion or a billion?

No, we bought 2.2 billion worth of Bitcoin. We own about 5, a bit more than 5 billion depending upon the day. Wow. More than 5 billion in Bitcoin.

Okay.

All right. You, uh, you have a— for the— not everyone's gonna be able to see this, but you have a ship behind you, right? Like a huge— what is that?

It's an antique handmade model, a 19th century model of a 17th-century galleon. Like, I think a model of the Amsterdam, a galleon that sailed out of Amsterdam in the 17th century. And it was made in the 19th century. So, it's a very interesting piece.

Are you a car guy?

I have a bunch of cars, but no, I'm not a car guy.

What's the coolest one you have?

I lean toward SUVs. I have a bunch of SUVs. I had a Lexus convertible that I used to love that I drove a lot, but I don't really drive a lot.

So you can give Sam a grade. Sam just sold his company, came into a bunch of money, and he bought what? What did you buy, Sam?

Okay. So, I was driving it all this weekend and I've been getting made fun of. I can't believe people are making fun of me. Do you know what an AMG station wagon is? Like a Mercedes AMG?

I can imagine.

Okay, so basically there's Mercedes, which is, everyone knows Mercedes. And then there's AMG, which is like a subsidiary. And they basically put race car engines into cars. And I bought this, but the problem about fast cars and cool cars is that they're like super unpractical mostly. And but I wanted something that was like kind of fast and fun to drive, but I wanted to be more practical. And there's this thing called an AMG E63 wagon. It's a station wagon. It looks like a mom car, except you can put your dog in the back and it has 5 seats, but still goes 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. So I bought a souped-up station wagon, like one of the fastest cars on the road, but it's a station wagon. That's my— that's currently what I'm driving right now.

Works for you.

Well, I was looking for someone to geek out on it, but I guess that you're— I would've— for some reason I pegged you as a car guy, but I guess I'm wrong.

I'm more into boats and planes than cars.

What do you— what does that mean if you're into planes?

Well, I like aircraft because if an aircraft can go Mach 0.89 or Mach 0.85, you're allowed to legally fly it that fast.

What is Mach 8, like 2,000 miles an hour?

No, Mach 8.5 would be like 500 knots or something like that. So the point is airplanes can fly at their full speed and yachts or boats can go at their full speed over the water. But an automobile that could go 160 miles an hour you don't very often get to do that legally. So I like vehicles that you can operate at their design point legally and safely.

Well, what planes do you have?

It's a good feeling as an engineer. I have a Global Express XRS.

Fucking A. Before we get into Bitcoin stuff, because Sean's been talking about you for like a year now, because he was following MicroStrategy and all that. But you own a ton of domain names, right?

Yeah, I bought a bunch.

How many do you own now? Or how many have you owned?

I won't count all. I mean, I own hundreds and hundreds, but the ones that are our top-level primary domain names, about 16, like words in the English language that everybody understands. I own Emma. Frank, I own my own name. I own michael.com. I also own my nickname, mike.com. So like my personal website, I've got it on michael.com. You just type michael.com, you see all the stuff about me.

Hope. Yeah, Sam, go to hope.com, see where that takes you.

Tell the short version of that story. The story is kind of crazy. I've heard it once before, but I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are, these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There's only one, you know, there's only one owner of each of these names. You own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And at some point you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick.

Well, I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn't it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there'll be a Google Voice or there'll be, you know, some, some telco company that'll want to launch some service. And what a great domain to launch on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time. And, and, uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures. We were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created created a company called Alarm.com. And Alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It's like $4 or $5 billion market cap company. And you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called Angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million. And that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And, uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good, uh, commercialization. And someone out of the blue, they contacted us, uh, one of the domain brokers. And they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We'll give you $150,000. And, uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me, said they offered $150,000. I said no. So I thought nothing of it because I just, I couldn't see the point. A week later they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later they go, well, the broker's really insistent, uh, and so they went to $600,000. I said no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don't tell anything. Tell them, you know, like, we're not interested. It's got to be something serious. So they went to $1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, well, send them a note or something and just tell them. I said, it's like, it's the word voice in the English language, right? So it's going to have to be something, you know, north of, I don't know, I don't think I said 7 or 8 figures, but I just said, A lot of money. And so it went on and they doubled again to $2.5 million, and then $5 million, and then around $10 million. Then they said— I had like 18 people in my office, or not 8, but 8 people. They're like looking at me like, aren't you— are you going to take the money? It's like a lot of money now. I said, no, send them back. At this point, send them back a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language, and it's worth $1 billion to the right company. And they said, "Well, you're going to give them a response?" I said, "Okay, tell them $30 million. Tell them I'll take $30 million for it." Because I thought like if I didn't give them some number, they would stop negotiating after, you know, 5 nos. So, I said, "Tell them $30 million. I don't want to sell it for $30 million. I want to sell it for $100 million or more, but I guess I'll say $30 million." So at that point, they said, "Well, you know, they offered you—" I think they upped their offer to like $12 million. I said, "Tell them no, but if you want, I'll take a meeting with them." So when it got to $12 million, I said I'd get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, "Well," "Okay, how about $22 million?" And I said, "Let me explain. This is like my daughter. I'm willing to marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain at $30 million." And so if you don't want to give me the 30, you know, I'm going to regret after I sell it anyway. I'll have seller's remorse, but I would, I would do it just to make the market. But if you don't want to value it at 30, I'll just keep it. And they're like, uh, okay, we'll give you 30. I said, okay.

So 30, you went, you got a 30 from 100K.

So they did like double 7 or 8 times. And I eventually They started at $150K, I think, and we ended it. And I said $30K, we ended at $30K. But the point was I didn't really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe $600 million in cash in the bank and the company, the MicroStrategy, is a multi-billion-dollar company. So, I was like, a million is not going to move the needle for me. $100,000 is not going to move the needle for me. $10 million is not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there's no point in doing it unless it was something material.

Were you like, you know, the 8 people in your office, were they like your coworkers or—

Well, like any reasonable— most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have your extreme personality type and that's why you're very successful. But any reasonable person would say, "What are you, an idiot? You paid nothing for this. Take it." But were you always that like—

And so right now it looks like you own, or you owned, or you currently own—

I own Strategy. I own a lot of—

Yeah, so Strategy, Wisdom.com, Alarm.com, Angel.com, AA Alert, Courage, Mike.com, Voice.com, Usher.com, Hope, Speaker.com, Michael, Mike, Saylor.org. So you own a bunch of them.

Yeah, and so my view is like trying to sell the— I got 20 Picassos and I wanted the world of market to value Picassos. So I sell the first one for $30 million, but the next one I want $100 million for, or I really want someone to create a billion-dollar business with me. On that, right? That's the right way to think of it. And I mean, look at it this way. How many people have learned to speak English on Earth? What is that number? 2 billion, maybe? Yep. How many years of your life do you learn, do you spend learning English? I mean, a typical person spends, takes English 10 years. Like from kindergarten through 12, maybe 12 years. But let's say that we shorten it. 2 billion people spend 4 years of their life, and that's 8 billion years of time spent figuring out how to spell and type your brand. What's the— if you value the 8 billion years at $20 an hour, that's $160 billion worth of money spent teaching people that hope is a good thing, right? What's it worth? Like, what's it worth, like, to have a brand which is universally understood and easy to spell that's burned into the head of billions of people? You know, you couldn't— you're going to go and buy advertising to convince them that H-O-O-P-E Is a good thing? Hopi? Or like, not really. So I think that, um, they're just good investments. They're scarce real estate in cyberspace, and they'll always be good, and the world undervalues them. But in time, like when I tell you alarm.com, you can remember alarm. You can go type alarm when you get off this podcast. Anybody that wants to go check out what alarm.com does, they don't have to go and like look it up and sort through 197,000 Google search pages to figure out which one is the one that Saylor was talking about.

And I'll remember it too, by the way. Like what you just said, you just pitched me on an idea. I'll get off this podcast, and if 4 weeks from now someone asks you, so what was that meditation business thing? I'll be like, CALM.com. Right. Hopefully they got the right spelling of it, right? Yeah.

No, there's 3 L's. No, I'm just joking. It's the, it's the right one. Um, all right. So let's, let's talk about, let's talk about something else. So you, you, uh, you've been in the game for a while. I think you might be, how long you've been, you've been like the CEO of MicroStrategy for what, 30 years almost?

Since 1989. So 31 years. I've been the public company CEO since 1998. I think Sam was born in 1989. Public company.

Yeah, you've been the— you've been a publicly traded company or a public CEO longer than I've been alive.

And so, uh, and you've kind of had some ups and downs. So I, I saw an interview of you on Charlie Rose, um, you know, you were looking like Tom Cruise. You go on Charlie Rose and they're— you're flying high. You're a 34-year-old guy who took the company public. I think MicroStrategy was worth $11 billion or something at that point. And, uh, and best of all, I think you owned half of it, or maybe a little bit more than half of the company. And so you're, you know, a 34-year-old billionaire. And I think, you know, a few years later, the stock price crashed pretty dramatically. Uh, but you— I think there's two kind of remarkable things. A, I want to hear what was it like to be in that position and then face that crash. And then B, how the hell did you keep your job? Was it because you owned a controlling stake in the company? Because most CEOs cannot survive a stock price crash from $300-something a share to under 50 cents a share.

How did that happen? You know, I think if you're in business long enough, you're gonna have setbacks and you know, you can't let the setbacks crush your spirit or cause you to stop thinking and stop innovating and stop growing. So I mean, they're humbling. Well, we all kind of know that's the right answer.

But like when— Sorry? We all kind of know that's the right answer. Like, hey, setbacks happen, you gotta pick yourself up. And that's true and everybody sort of agrees. But when it does happen, what, like, do you remember what that felt like? What the day was when you're experiencing this crash? What were you thinking as it was happening? It's not pleasant.

It's not pleasant, but you know, you have to move on, right? You have to focus. You have responsibilities.

Okay. And you were talking about at one point you're like, all right, when I was selling this domain name— when did you sell that domain name?

How many years ago? Um, 2 years ago, maybe.

Okay, so not that long ago actually. But you were saying like, well, we had— I had $600 million in cash, the company was doing great. Why continue staying as the CEO when it seems like you're incredibly— I mean, Bitcoin seems like you're one of your main top 2 focuses next to MicroStrategy, why not just focus entirely on that as opposed to continuing to run this business?

So, let's lay out the context for people who don't know exactly how it all played out. Because I would say, in our audience, we're going to get about 300,000, 400,000 listeners this month.. And in that audience, probably, you know, 5% are as crazy about Bitcoin as me and have put like, you know, you know, a huge chunk of their net worth into Bitcoin. And then, you know, 50% are curious and 50% are novices, let's say, you know, just roughly rounding things out. And so just to put into context, MicroStrategy is this couple billion dollar public company. It's been around for a while, has good track record, has a business selling enterprise software. You generate a ton of cash, your business spits off cash, you have about $500, $600 million. I'm just using fuzzy numbers. It doesn't— specifics don't matter. You use about $500, $600 billion of cash. That's your treasury for your company. And you're looking for something to do with it. And at some point you realize you have this treasury problem and, and you're not alone. Actually, all companies have this treasury problem, whether they are aware of it or not. So can you describe the treasury problem that you experienced and you experienced it at a $500 million level? But anybody including an individual with $500,000 or $100,000 in the bank, has the same fundamental problem. So explain the Treasury problem as you saw it a few years ago, or yeah, a year ago.

The Treasury problem is that subsequent to March 2020, the cost of capital exploded from 8% to 25%. And, uh, you can see that in the performance of the S&P 500 index, which went from about 8% a year for a decade to more than 25% in that next year. That means that anybody investing money on behalf of a limited partner or any other investor has to generate that cost of capital in order to avoid destroying wealth. If you generated less than an 8% yield for the decade from 2010 to 2020 as a financial advisor, you destroyed wealth because the alternative was just to buy the SPY index. If you generated less than 25% from March of 2020 onward, you destroyed wealth because you could have made 25%, actually a bit more depending on what day of the week you measure it or what day of the year you measure it. You could have generated that much just by owning the index. Now, um, The Treasury problem is that when the cost of capital is zero, if, by the way, the cost of capital is being driven by the expansion of the money supply, the Federal Reserve is expanding the M2 money supply by about 5 to 6% a year for that decade. And when you tack on the risk premium, you get to your 8% S&P return. When the Federal Reserve expands the M2 money supply by 20 to 25%, that's where you get that explosion in the cost of capital. The inflation doesn't show up in consumer goods. The inflation immediately shows up in assets. We have asset inflation. Within minutes of when the central bank decides to stimulate the economy, the price of all the assets explodes. Um, and so the problem for every company, all 100 million companies in the world, every private company, every public company, the problem is you have capital in your treasury and that capital has to yield the cost of capital. And if it doesn't, you're destroying shareholder value. Another way to say it is if you generate cash and you put it into the bank account to pay zero interest, and if If the cost of everything you want to buy goes up by 10% a year, in 7 years you'll only be able to buy half as much. You've lost half of the value of your savings. When that discount rate or that cost of capital doubles, well, then in 3.5 years you've lost half your money. At a 25% cost of capital, in 3 years you've lost half your wealth. So, the Treasury problem is The cost of capital has exploded, and the cost of capital, as it goes through the roof, puts every company in a quandary. They either have to decapitalize and give all of their assets back to their shareholders because they can't— if Sam is controlling an investment company that invests in dollars and you are running an investment company that invests in the S&P 500 index, and I gave each of you a million and Sam proudly tells me how he didn't lose my money and you tell me you made 25% return, I'm pulling all my money out of Sam's fund and I'm putting it into your fund. So ultimately the problem is the company's sitting on capital. If it can't meet the cost of capital, it has to give the money back to the shareholders or at least it's under extreme political pressure from the share. Everybody's beating you up as CEO saying, what are you doing with all that cash? You should just pay a dividend or you should buy the stock back. And, um, and the second pressure you have is if you run a company and your cash flows are growing at 8% a year but the cost of capital is 25% a year, that means that I'm discounting you at a rate that's higher than your growth rate. In essence, the value of your stock is going to be forecast to go to zero. You can't hold value in a company growing at 5% a year when the cost of capital is 25% a year. That's why the only thing you can buy is going to be a high-tech stock that's growing. You need to buy a tech monopoly that can grow 20% or 25% a year. And if you come to me with a business idea for a company which makes a lot of cash or makes a lot of money but is growing 2% a year or 1% a year, I'm just not interested in a high cost of capital environment. So the problem we faced in March is, what do we do? Give all the money back to the shareholders, or can we find something to invest in that, that's going to actually generate more than 25% return? And that puts us to a question. So what we did in essence was split the difference. You know, if, if I was in a situation, in the ideal situation, you would just buy $500 million worth of Bitcoin. And put out a press release and do it. But if you did that, that would be such a shock to the outside shareholders that the fear would be, well, is someone going to sue us or dump the stock because you were so aggressive? Because they'll claim that you took a risk that you didn't disclose. So our response is, let's disclose, everybody, we're about to take a risk. And after that, let's go ahead and take a risk, but at the same time, let's give everybody an insurance policy. So we We offered to buy back $250 million worth of the stock in this Dutch auction. So if you disagree with the decision to buy Bitcoin, you can sell the stock back at a profit. Our stock was $120. We offered to buy the stock back at up to $140. And so we cushioned the blow of the investment strategy by giving people an exit strategy from the equity. That rotates the shareholder base. And then we began to pursue the Bitcoin strategy as a primary treasury reserve asset with, uh, with a different shareholder base.

So let me ask you a question now. Yeah, I like the analogy or the, the kind of the awareness that, hey, we have this giant bowl of ice cream that's melting. That's, that's your cash pile that's melting. And the heat is basically the money printer that is, uh, causing asset inflation.

So you needed to do something with that. You didn't want it to all melt away, so you decide to do this. Now, a couple quick questions. One is, uh, this is sort of rapid fire. I've got a couple rapid fire questions for you. Yeah, in 20 years from now, what do you think has generated more value, uh, or more income to the company, uh, to MicroStrategy? Is it the operating income of MicroStrategy or the investment income of the Bitcoin it holds?

The investment income for sure. Okay. And then, uh, you know, to be, to be very clear, what happened in March of 2020 is when the cost of capital goes to 25%, that means that every investor and all investment income— every, every investor generated 25% more doing nothing, right? And every Main Street company that worked 25% harder got nothing, right? Right. You literally tilt the playing field so that if you don't own— if you own assets, you're having the best year of 30 years. And if you don't own assets, it's impossible to have a good year, right?

And, um, and so, so the second question is, um, you, uh, as you acquire— as you acquire more and more Bitcoin, is MicroStrategy bet— like, do you just position the company at this point like it's a Bitcoin ETF? It's like, buy this, buy this Bitcoin buying and holding company.

It's not a Bitcoin ETF. Everybody's— you're sloppy with those words. An ETF is a company that invests in securities and it tries to keep its assets under management equal to the amount of shares of ETF that it sold. It's a financial company. An ETP is a similar type of company that invests in commodities. If you create, you know, if you create this Bitcoin entity that, that equalizes assets under management equal to the shares you sell, you created a Bitcoin ETP. We're neither of those things. We're not a finance company, we're not an ETF, we're not an ETP, we're not equal, we're not buying or selling Bitcoin to equalize assets under management. We're an operating company that owns property. Bitcoin is property. And in that way, you should think of it as a company that— like, I bought a million acres of land in Texas, or I bought a million gallons of, of fill in the blank, a million bushels of soybean. You can buy any kind of property, right? And, and you're holding it on your balance sheet as a company, right? That's what we, uh, that's what we are. Now, what's your question?

You are talking about, like, let's say the, the cost of capital, uh, being 25%, right? Because since March, that's what the S&P 500 is on. But the, the stock market goes, you know, it does go up and down. In years where, you know, the market dips and, and goes up, you know, the average, you know, over time, the geometric mean is whatever, 7 or 8%, something like that. So some would argue, okay, yes, this year assets inflated by that much, that doesn't mean next year it's going to remain at 25% a year. And so you have to make some prediction, right? And so are you, are you basically forecasting it at 25%, 15%, 10%, 8%? And does the decision change at a certain number there?

When you were first starting MicroStrategy, you were in the weeds, you were thinking, I have to make a product, that solves a problem and I have to make money off of it right now. You've gone way up the hierarchy of now we can do whatever we want. Now you can do whatever you want. At what point did you notice a shift like, oh my gosh, like this business is stable, it's working, it's working pretty well. It's quite predictable. At what point did that shift happen? Because what you're talking about now is quite foreign to what Look, we solved our problem when we actually embraced Bitcoin.

And what percentage of your time now are you spending on this, on investing the income versus on the day-to-day of MicroStrategy, of just the business as usual, making the products that— making business intelligence products versus investing the the income?

I'm the CEO, but we have a president, and the president of the company is Phong Le, and he actually has day-to-day operational responsibility for sales, marketing, and even technology development at this point. So, I'm the chairman and the CEO. I oversee the company strategy and I oversee financial strategies. I oversee long-term direction and I oversee technology strategy, but I'm not in the weeds in the day-to-day running the business. That's really left for the operating executive team.

So about a year ago, I tweeted out that I had moved 25% of my net worth into Bitcoin, which has now become like, I don't know, 50+ percent almost. And a friend called me, our friend who comes on this podcast named Andrew Wilkinson. Very successful business guy. He's got a public company in Canada now, sort of has— owns businesses that are worth about over a billion, over a billion dollars. And he called me and he was just like, hey, I just want to make sure you know what you're doing here. And, you know, like a concerned friend. And he comes from like kind of the Warren Buffett, you know, he's a Warren Buffett disciple. And famously Buffett and Munger, you know, Charlie Munger called Bitcoin rat poison, and then Buffett called it rat poison squared. And so you get really intelligent people, um, who are well respected for what they've done, um, talking about Bitcoin. So first, what's your reaction to the Buffett opinion on Bitcoin?

So it almost is It's almost like rooted in the decision to do all of this is definitely shareholder stuff, shareholder value. But a lot of it was like rooted like, well, I just want to attract great talent. Or that was definitely a factor. How has— how many people work there now? 2,000? About 2,000. How has this impacted your ability to recruit and retain people?

It's been great for retention and it's been great for recruiting. We can get We get people, first of all, the company's brand has been amped up by a factor of 1,000. I mean, a lot more people know us now. And what's the culture like now?

Is it different?

Just more, just happy. Bitcoin is hope. Okay, so let me say it a different way. If your family has $100,000 and you showed up, you know, today and I told you it was in a bank in Lebanon and now it's $20,000, but you can't spend it and it's going to zero. What's your family's morale, right? Well, death. And if you— if your family had $100,000 in Bitcoin at the same— in the same year, and I told you, oh, by the way, Bitcoin's up by 1,000%, and now you have a million dollars, and it's probably going to keep going up forever, and you don't have to worry about—

it's not black and white like that. It's not black and white. No, it's not. I'm looking at your Glassdoor reviews. I'm looking at the Glassdoor reviews. Not everyone agrees. Surely there's downside to this. I mean, not everyone agrees. I'm looking at— I see a lot of bad reviews, and every great company has a lot of bad reviews, but it's not black and white that everyone agrees. I mean, you have a 43% review on Glassdoor. I know that Glassdoor isn't the full picture, but it's clear that not everyone agrees with your opinion.

Is that only stats for the past 6 months?

No, there's 1,000 reviews and it's been up there. Isn't it for the past decade? Um, but I can sort by date, so I can, I can tell you a number by any— you could just— I could set it by, uh, any constraint. Right now it's, uh, all, so 1,000 reviews with— and it's, and it's a low review. Um, and I— and so it doesn't seem that everyone agrees with you.

You're looking at the past 10 years, and if you go back over the past 10 years, we had, uh, we had one point where the company was contracting and we laid off employees.

And so, so no, I'm looking at reviews all from 2020.

There's— I think truth be told, nobody gives a shit about Glassdoor reviews, right? Like, you know, I do.

I don't know. I think that there— I think there's two— no, no matter how thin the pancake, there's always two sides. But there's bits of truth in all of it, right? You could, you could gain strength.

What is the— do you— what is the point you would like to make, and what shall we discuss?

What I want to know is, is what's been the downside of this? Because it's not black and white that everyone agrees with you. It's not black and white that like this has been perfect.

Sam, can I ask you a question in a slightly different way? I think I get what you're trying to say. So it's not, not necessarily, oh, have people disagreed with you? Because right now also you look like a genius. You bought the thing, the brand is up, the stock is up, the Bitcoin price is up. Like, if you really disagree now, this is your own personal problem at this point. The strategy has clearly worked up till Now, the question is more that, hey, we've had periods of time— I've been holding Bitcoin since 2013, 2014. And I've seen Bitcoin go down, you know, 70, 80% drawdowns. And you have basically taken out a bunch of debt, you bought Bitcoin, you own $5 billion of Bitcoin, the majority of the company's value is the Bitcoin, the assets that it owns. And if we do see— I think we kind of agree volatility will dampen over time, but that doesn't mean we can't see a drawdown like that again. What happens when Bitcoin price drops by 50% again? You know, what's your reaction to that? How, you know, how does that affect your strategy or what's your overall viewpoint of this possibility? That's not— that's not a downside of your strategy, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On a day-to-day level at the company, I'd say I imagine there's a ton of people that love this. But what is— what has been any of the downsides of this? Because I— with every great decision, there's always going to be downsides as well as upsides. I can't see any downside for the employees.

They've all benefited. I can't see any downside for the investors that stayed with us. They've all benefited, right? I mean, there are critics out there that don't like Bitcoin, and by the way, there are people that will say, you're a CEO, you shouldn't invest it, you know. I— there are, there are people that will say operating companies shouldn't have assets, right? There's a crit— like, uh, there's criticism. People say, well, you're CEO, you should go back to your cubicle and write software and leave the investing to the professionals. But I think that the, the fundamental elephant in the room here is that the macroeconomic environment is so incredibly unfair to people without assets. Like literally, if you're an operating company or a Main Street company, you have to work 30% harder to stand still. And if you're a Wall Street company, you can stand still and get 30% more. Like the playing field is so tilted in favor of property owners or asset holders against manufacturers and companies that do things that you, You can't really be successful in business unless you have assets as part of your strategy.

And so, okay, so me and Sam were asking different questions. Sam wanted to know more about the morale. I want to know if we do see another Bitcoin, you know, crash, draw, but draw down 50%, 60%, uh, what happens to your position and, uh, what happens to your, your point of view?

Uh, and I think we're gonna, we're gonna have to wrap, uh, based on time. So appreciate you coming on. Uh, do you want to leave anybody with a way to, way to find you, a place to follow, a place to take a next step if they, you know, liked what they heard?

Sure. If you're interested in Bitcoin, Bitcoin is hope. So go to hope.com. We have lots of information in it. If you want to follow me, I'm, uh Michael_Saylor on Twitter. How much do you think Bitcoin.com is worth?

Roger Ver owns it now. How much would you be paying for Bitcoin.com? I don't know.

I wouldn't speculate. I wouldn't speculate.

I think that's a reasonable thing to say. I agree with it. Another big picture way to say it is there's $100 trillion of Treasury assets that have a negative real yield of -10% to -15% a year. That means they're destroying $10 trillion a year of value. The solution is convert all of that money into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a trillion-dollar asset. People that understand Bitcoin think it's going to grow to become the $10 trillion asset asset that gold is. And then it's going to replace negative yielding sovereign debt and then corporate debt. And ultimately it will become the primary treasury reserve network and treasury reserve asset. And so if you have a company, if you're an investor, it makes sense to buy it because it's got a brilliant future and it solves a problem that everybody on Earth has. And if you're a company, it makes sense to plug your treasury into Bitcoin because the road to serfdom is working exponentially harder for currency growing exponentially weaker. You're just gonna work yourself to death. Put yourself in the position of working as hard as you can in Venezuela or Argentina or Zimbabwe and roll the clock forward a decade and ask yourself the question, what do you wish you did? And the answer is protect your assets, protect your monetary energy or your treasury by putting it into a scarce asset in a bank in cyberspace where no one can steal it, debase it, or destroy it. And, and that's the Bitcoin ethos. We're simply trying to— we're trying to make it worthwhile to do the other stuff. There's no point in doing 100 million other things if at the end of the journey you've got nothing to show for it.

Yeah, why, why create all the value if you cannot store it? So here's a better store of value.

Yeah, but that's the big idea, and that's, and that's a business strategy for everybody— small, medium, large, doesn't matter.

And you know, I'm just kind of anticipating somebody hears this and they say, but we're not Argentina, we're not Venezuela, do I really need to worry about this? And what's your answer to that?

My answer is the single most important thing for you to, to have in your life is a forecast for the money supply expansion in your country for the next 8 years. So I would say that before you invest the next decade of your life doing whatever, stop and study up on macroeconomics and form an opinion about the rate at which your currency is going to lose economic energy. And then you can act accordingly. If you think that the currency is going to hold— by the way, the currency has never held— it's lost 6% of its value every year forever. It's always losing 6% of its value. You just have to decide for the next decade whether or not the cost of capital is going to be 8%, 12%, 16%, or 20%. And once you make that decision, that will inform you with regard to what degree of enthusiasm will you pursue a hard asset strategy. If you think that the currency is going to weaken rapidly, then you would shift, you would, um, you would shift and prioritize hard asset strategy and hard asset acquisition, um, aggressively. And if you think that the currency is going to not weaken that rapidly, you would prioritize other strategies, right? And you— everybody's got to make that decision for themselves. But when, you know, when Zimbabwe started to crash, normal companies Management consulting companies started buying lumber and coal and oil and anything they could buy because at least you'll still have it tomorrow, whereas the cash, the currency, the receivables will be worth nothing. So you just have to make that decision. We can't— there's plenty of information in the world for you to form your own opinion. Once you formed your opinion, then, then you can act accordingly. Cool.

All right, Michael, thank you for coming on. Yeah, we appreciate it.

This is great. Um, thank you. Yeah, we just did this interview with Michael— what's this, Saylor? Or the L, right? And no, I mean, I wouldn't have a sailor or sailor without an L.

Recap it and then explain your opinion. But first, objectively try to recap it objectively.

Uh, we had this guy on He's objectively successful financially, objectively a wonderful businessman. He came on for— He said ahead of time his objective for this interview was to promote Bitcoin, which that's cool. We could talk about that for a bit. I'm down with that. I wanted to ask him a little bit more beyond that, but we didn't get to it. And he talked for 60+ minutes all about this topic. And I personally pressed him on a few topics. And he disagreed with me. And my vibe— this is— all right, we're past the objective part. My vibe from this was, uh, I don't trust— I don't trust his opinion.

Okay, so I'll give you my two cents and then we'll, we'll just talk about it real quick. So I just was— I thought he came on just kind of low energy slash maybe like kind of arrogant. I don't know, smug a little bit. Not in a bad way, but I think at the beginning we were clearly trying to like warm him up, just talk to him about something, and he had zero interest in, uh, in chatting about, uh, anything besides the virtues of Bitcoin. And so that was a little bit, I don't know, just personally a little off-putting, I guess. Like, I find it more fun when a guest comes on and there's somebody that you leave the podcast being like, man, I want to— I'd love to hang with that person more. Um, I think that's a great sign for the guest, and I think in this case I didn't walk away with that feel. I agree with all the things you said objectively. He's super smart, literally a rocket scientist who built a billion-dollar company by the time— a $10 billion company by the time he was 34. From 24 to 34, he built a $10 billion company, has been running it for 30 years as a public company CEO, went into Bitcoin heavy and has made $3 billion in Bitcoin. Like, the guy is definitely a smart guy. And I think ahead of the curve in many ways. I've read his book The Mobile Wave, which he wrote 2012, basically saying that mobile's gonna— like, mobile's gonna destroy everything. And, um, which in 2012 was a sort of safe prediction, but, uh, still a good prediction nonetheless. I don't agree with you that he was just like— what'd you say, like, not trustworthy or something? So explain.

Well, and let me just say, this is a knee-jerk reaction, so I don't want My opinion's certainly evolving as, as it's going. And I've— Sean, you've talked about him all the time. So that was my experience too. I read his Wikipedia page and I probably watched the top 2 or 3 interviews. That's my experience. I don't want to say distrusting, but there was something about it. So in the interview, I questioned about something silly. Not, not silly. I don't think it's silly. Sean thinks it's silly and that's okay. I understand why someone thinks that. I said your Glassdoor reviews are pretty shitty, like recently.

Um, well, no, you asked a more reasonable question. You said, it's all been okay, great, Bitcoin's up, this is your stock price is up, but like, what have been the downsides? Which I think is a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

And he was just like, well, there are no downsides. And I was like, well, that's like objectively false because there's, there, there's some people, they could, they're anonymous and, and it's Glassdoor, so that doesn't hold a ton of weight. But there's a lot of people on your reviews that say that this is crazy and that your products are failing and you're doing this to distract that. Like, what are the downsides? And he— I think he, he kind of dodged the question and I couldn't get the truth out of him. And because of that, I'm like, if I can't trust something so obvious, or if someone can't give me a straight answer on something I feel is so obvious, of saying like, yeah, look, there's a ton of upside, which I've discussed, but here's some of the downsides, then in my head I'm like, well, I— can I believe anything you're saying?

Right. Once you are, um, Once you are not reasonable or rational about one thing, I can't fully think you're reasonable and rational about this other thing that you're telling me about. That's kind of what you're saying. How you do anything is how you do everything.

And I also think that anyone who brags about how rational they are are some of the least rational people. I don't—

which, by the way, I don't think he bragged about it. I think it's like when you ask him, you know, this person says this bad thing about it, he's like, well, I just think it's a clear because of this, this is true. That's a rational thing in my opinion. I don't think he was—

yeah, he, he never claimed— he never said that, correct. But he said like, well, this is, this is an incredibly rational decision. I don't see downsides. And I'm like, well, we're naturally not rational.

I'll defend his— I'll defend— by the way, I spent most of the podcast basically, even though I'm a huge Bitcoin bull, I spent most of the podcast bringing up things that a critic of his strategy and a critic of Bitcoin would say, just because I wanted to hear his answers. But in general, like, I get what he's saying, that, look, we bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, it's gained $3 billion more, our stock price is up, I don't know, 4x since we made this strategy change. And you're asking me, like, how do my employees feel? Like, they feel great. Our brand just went up 1,000x. People know what MicroStrategy is now, they didn't know what the hell it was before. Um, our Stock price is up. Our assets are— we've gained a lot more value in our assets. So what are you talking— he was basically like, there's no downside, that's all upside. So I get that. But he didn't, you know, give you the inch that I think most, most reasonably people would do, which is to say that, yeah, everything has its tradeoffs. Maybe like he could have said it was really complicated to go through the process of being the first public company to make this huge Bitcoin purchase. And so that was a huge just regulatory and legal, you know, like mess we had to work through, but I'm glad we did. Or like, you know, there's always some people in the company that disagree with the decision. And so they, you know, they haven't, you know, they're no longer with us or, you know, they've had to get on board with something that they didn't see as was the right decision. And that's always tough. Whenever you have strong-minded people, you're not all going to 100% agree with a radical strategy. He could have said any of those things. He didn't, but that doesn't make me personally distrust him. I think for you, that was a turnoff.

I, I don't want to— I, like I said before, this is all knee-jerk. It just happened. I, I— so I want to be careful my words. If I said distrust, I, I actually— I take that back. I don't entirely mean distrust, but I, I mean that there's something going on that I had this gut feeling that, um, I can't just believe what you're saying, and I want to go and— and this should be the case all the time.

I want to go learn my own, right? I think it's all pretty above board, which is that he's basically bet his entire company on Bitcoin now. They own $5 billion of Bitcoin. The company's worth $7 billion. And Bitcoin, you know, so obviously— and his objective, his stated objective to us coming on was to communicate the nature and virtues of Bitcoin to the audience and leave them excited about the opportunities that Bitcoin offers. So he wasn't— there was no bait and switch. He said what he wanted to do. He tried to do that. And it's clear that he is incentivized for more people, companies, and individuals to buy Bitcoin because he is may be the largest holder of Bitcoin in the world. I don't know what Satoshi's stake is worth now. Maybe check that out. Does he have more Bitcoin than Satoshi? I don't think so. I think he said—

I think he said in the podcast $3 billion at one point.

Abreu, what did you think?

I mean, I think I— are you just quaking in fear right now? Say what you really want to say.

Let's not, let's not, uh, not say what I will say, that I for the most part agree with what you guys said. I mean, talking about Michael himself, like, super intelligent but professorial. He, like, he doesn't make for a great guest. And you see this on other podcasts as well, like when Joe Rogan has, like, some world-renowned, like, super intelligent, like, scientists on Sometimes they're, you know, they're— they, they just want to go on about their field and their studies. And, um, so they— those don't make for the best guests. So I'll say that.

Um, yeah, which is kind of sad because, you know, from my point of view, my— I, I guess we both walked away from the podcast feeling a little disheartened, or I don't know, like, whatever. We didn't— we didn't feel like we, we had a slam dunk. Um, I think you, for a different reason than me— for me, it was just I didn't think it was highly entertaining for people, and I'm kind of bummed about that because I actually think it's a super fucking— I think he's a super fucking interesting guy, has had a super interesting life and business story. And also what he's doing with Bitcoin, I think is super interesting. So somehow, despite there being an underlying like substance that is super interesting, I don't think it got communicated. I almost wish I could just do a Billy of the Week segment just explaining everything I know about Michael Saylor, doing the research for this interview. I think that would be way more entertaining than what actually happened when he came on was basically talking about quite technical, economically technical terms that I think for most people, they're not going to resonate with. It's not going to click. And doing it in a way that was sort of like, it didn't feel like somebody who was trying to break it down and make it more accessible. It was just like, this is what it is. And I can sort of explain it in bits and pieces to you if you want. And if you don't see it, you're crazy, you know.

One of the best parts was towards the end, Sean, when you like took a few minutes and kind of explained what we just talked about on a high level. I thought that was like the easiest part to digest of the whole thing. And more— that should have been more of what the podcast was, and unfortunately it wasn't. And it wasn't for a lack of research as far as like the interview not being that great. Like, we put— you guys put a ton of research into this. Um, I think sometimes just the guest personality doesn't make for the, the best podcast.

Well, I think people can listen to it. Uh, it's an hour long. I, I, I want to say I appreciate him coming on. Michael is a big deal. Uh, uh, I, I definitely appreciate him coming on. I'm gonna— I wanna— I definitely want to take back, like, you know, the whole I don't trust him entirely, but, uh, there's something sitting there after that interview. There's something sitting right where something inside of me is like, uh, something is going on here. And I got to figure out what it is. Maybe we can have them on another time now that we kind of like know them a little bit more. But yeah, I'm sure—

themselves, you know, actually it'll be kind of interesting because we're going to leave this in, by the way, like whatever our discussion about it. And I hope, I hope it kind of gets received as what it is. This is an instant hot take reaction to something that we were really excited about. Then it happened. We're giving a quick reaction. I think, you know, Sam basically didn't see the kind of the Bitcoin bull case as black and white as maybe Michael Saylor put it.

First of all, Well, like, let me just say that I— what I— my opinion of him is totally separate of Bitcoin. I would say I'm a huge novice. I'm not an expert, but I felt that he was actually— he was a poor representation of it because there's something about it that I'm like, oh, I don't know if I could trust this, right? Because he's representing it.

You weren't buying what he was selling. I don't know. I don't know how to put it, but nothing— no attack on his character. You just didn't walk away from listening to the guy for the hour and you didn't fully buy in. And like we do sometimes with certain guests where they start to explain what's going on in their field or their business and we walk away saying, shit, that guy knows what he's talking about. And like, I totally agree with the way the world is going and I want to invest in that guy's company. You know, that's sometimes the way we feel. He didn't persuade me.

If that was his goal, I don't think it— I don't think goal was not achieved. Can I give people the like—

I'm going to— can I try a 3-minute like Billy of the Week segment on this guy real quick?

This is your podcast. You do what you want. Yeah, go for it.

I mean, are you interested? I don't know if you're interested.

Okay. So let me just do it.

And he's like, $500 million, I think, personally, he said.

Uh, no, I think in this case it was the corporate treasury who had about $560 million. He owns the majority of the company. I think he owns currently—

like, no, I think, I think in the podcast he was like, I have whatever. He's basically— he was incredibly wealthy and the company was great.

Well, I think Michael and his team will reach out and say thank you, Sean, because I think that you did an awesome job of— you did a better job of showing off him than him, which is cool. And I think you're just better at storytelling. So maybe Maybe people will have the same opinion after this interview. The, the part that I, uh, kind of was like, I don't know how I feel about this, it happens like probably 15 minutes left in the episode. Maybe Abreu or someone will, uh, mark it, uh, and you guys will be able to hear for yourselves. But, uh, I think Sean, you're just really good at this. And, uh, I guess we'll see. Uh, this episode is gonna be weird. It's— I wonder what the people are gonna say. I guess we'll find out. Yeah, same.

All right, cool.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.