Michael Saylor Bitcoin for Corporations 2025 Keynote Speech

I'm Natalie Brunell. I'm the host of the Coin Stories podcast and I'm a Bitcoin educator on a mission to fix the money. It is truly an honor to stand here and introduce someone so prolific, influential, and giving of his time and his knowledge. Someone who really needs no introduction. Michael Sailor is the reason we are all here in this room today. When most corporate leaders were ignoring or dismissing Bitcoin, Michael stepped forward, putting his balance sheet and his reputation on the line. It's never easy to be the first to do something. But Michael Sailor did

just that. He didn't just question the system and point out its problems. He found a solution, a better way. And he acted boldly, publicly, and with laser focus. Such courage and conviction is scarce. He's proof that it's never too late to reinvent yourself. Not for personal gain, but for purpose, to serve a mission greater than yourself, greater than really all of us. He didn't just architect a new corporate playbook. He sparked a movement. And today he inspires thousands of business leaders from around the world to think independently and to think long term. I've come to

know Michael as the most generous teacher, one who cares deeply about principles, about freedom, and about helping others achieve economic empowerment. And while he's known for his insatiable appetite for Bitcoin, his most powerful contribution might just be his brilliant ideas. and its ideas that endure. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And I can't think of anyone more skilled at spreading the powerful idea of Bitcoin than him. So, please join me in welcoming the executive chairman of Strategy, Michael Sailor. [Applause] [Music] I am uh delighted to get the opportunity today to

speak with you about my favorite subject which is Bitcoin for corporations. Why should your corporation recapitalize on Bitcoin? And uh leading up to this presentation, I uh I had uh my team, my talented finance team uh working alongside my my three devoted AI assistants do a lot of research in order to explain this topic to you today. So I want to start with uh the challenge that every company faces. Uh if you've been living in the 21st century, you know that the winners are the digital monopolies. Apple's winning, Meta is winning, Google is winning, Microsoft

is winning, Amazon is winning. Uh the more unpleasant part of this observation is that the price that we pay for Amazon to win is 20,000 retailers have to lose. And the price we pay for Apple to win is 20,000 device manufacturers have to lose. And the price that we pay for Google to win is 20,000 journalist organizations, media, newspapers have to lose. And you can see from this chart uh the magnificent seven are certainly winning. The 500 greatest companies in the world that is out of the 400 million companies on the planet the 500 greatest

companies in the world are getting smoked by the s by by the magnificent 7. They're struggling. And uh I spent many years in the public market. If a public company can't grow organically 15% a year or more, institutional investors lose interest, uh the liquidity in the stock dries up, the uh the liquidity, the equity disappears, and then the options disappear. And you know, I I remember when it used to be everybody's dream, I can't wait to go public. You're going to start a company and your and your idea was if I could just go public,

I will have made it. And uh what I'm saying is going public is just the next step. But what you find is even if you do go public, unless you can keep up with a magnificent 7, you're not making it. Uh another way to look at the at the world today is in the public markets, uh most companies in the public market are are what I call zombie companies. Um they don't have much liquidity. They don't have an options market. They can't beat the S&P index. They can't retain earnings. They can't raise capital. They can't

take risk. They they're trapped in this paradigm where the capital is toxic, volatility is toxic, inflation is toxic. And this is the dilemma that we face. You can actually see it playing out if you look at a list of publicly traded companies over the past 20 years. This is publicly listed companies in the US and you can see how they've been getting ground down. Uh it's not a chart of success. Uh if if I showed you uh anything in the modern world and the chart went down and to the right, you would say this is

uh this is failure or this is a a a gradual progressive slide to malaise. We're just not creating healthy companies. Now it's not just public companies. If you take a snapshot of all the companies in the world, there are approximately 400 million companies in the world, small private companies everywhere. There's 400,000 large private companies. There's 40,000 listed companies in the world. 4,000 listed companies on the major exchanges in the US, the NASDAQ, the the NICE, 400 seasoned issuers. And uh probably many of you don't actually How many people in the audience know what a seasoned

issuer is? I'm interested just for my own awareness. Okay, you're going to learn something new today. A seasoned issuer is a public company that is uh is deemed seasoned enough, mature enough to be able to file a registration statement with the SEC and sell securities the same day. So another way to say it is 400 companies out of 400 million companies can raise capital in the United States and and the world's greatest capital market without friction. Um it it doesn't seem quite egalitarian. 400, you know, one in a million, one in a million. Um it

turns out that 0.06% of the businesses in the US are able to tap the capital markets. So if you're in business and you're struggling, you know, the conventional wisdom is if you were just better and worked harder, you'd be succeeding. But you can see that the traditional capital markets, they're structured to be uh exclusionary and elitist. Uh you could maybe this has gone back thousands of years. You can definitely trace it to the SEC act of 1933 and 1940 when the intent of the act was to cut off access to the capital markets to businesses

deemed to be quote too entrepreneurial unquote. So, here's the hard truth about publicly traded equities. If I expand my view from New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ to, you know, all the over-the-counter uh publicly traded securities, just 12,000 of those 12,000, 15% can beat the S&P index. 15 15% beat the index over the course of a decade. 12% of them have a stock that's got more than $10 million a day of liquidity. 83% of all the trading volume in the stock market in the United States is a 100 stocks. When you watch CNBC and it's

like Nvidia, Apple, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, my opinion of Apple, my opinion of Nvidia, my opinion of the 2x Nvidia ETF, Apple 2x Apple, Nvidia, Meta, Gold, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And if you're waiting for your favorite company to pop up, it's not going to pop up because the television knows that people just want to trade these hundred things. 8% of those companies have an option market. 8%. Okay, here's the painful one. All of the wealth created in the stock market comes from 4% of the public companies. 96% of these companies have performance equivalent to a

Treasury bill. That That's brutal, right? 96% of the companies can't beat a T bill. Here's a snapshot of stock performance of the S&P. So, we pull the 500 companies. These are the greatest 500 companies in the world. Uh, look at them on this distribution chart. What you can see is that the Magnificent 7, they're up 221% over the past four years. S&P is up 67%. 96% of the S&P companies are underperforming the MAG7. 96%. 68% can't beat the index. Bitcoin is for the rest of us. It's for the 96%. If you're not Apple, if you're

not Google, if you're not Microsoft, then you need to come up with a strategy. And as you can see, it's it's probably not going to be working harder. Here's a distribution of those companies based on market cap. The average S&P company, $ 35 billion market cap. Uh the Magnificent 7, 2.4 billion. So they're not quite a hundred times bigger. You got seven companies that are 100 times bigger. You've got all these other quote unquote big successful companies. They're they're at 1 to 2% of the size of the winners. This is liquidity, you know, and so

if you're looking at liquidity as a percentage of market cap, what you can see is that um the average is 1%. So 1% of your market cap is liquid every single day. our company uh of course off the charts 7%. Is volatility. Well, business school teaches you volatility is a bad thing. And so everybody's sent out of business school with a mission to strip the volatility from the balance sheet and then spend their entire life stripping the volatility from the P&L. And uh you could almost say they succeed. I mean, they've done a pretty good

job. Look how many have volatility less than the S&P index. You know, by the way, who has more volatility than the S&P index? Every rich person you admire, every wealthy person in the world has volatility more than the S&P index because they didn't strip the volatility from their balance sheet. Bernard Arno and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the people that were supposed to aspire to have massive volatility. And yet these great well-run companies in the world are going out of their way to strip their volatility. The number one way to strip your

volatility away, by the way, is uh give away all your money. Like if you want to strip the volatility from your family's balance sheet, give all of your family's wealth to charity. If you want to strip the volatility off of a company, then you you take all of the capital, all the cash flow of the company and you you either buy back the stock or dividend it out or give it to somebody else. And it works. But again, uh the idea it's kind of you almost can't make this stuff up, right? When you present it

that way, it's it's I have a strategy. If I just give away all my wealth, I don't have to worry about losing it. Think about that. Um, here's a distribution of open interest. This is the interest in the options market as a percentage of market cap. And what you can see is maybe people want to trade Tesla and Nvidia. I mean, they read about them, we speculate about them, we gossip about them. There's something to trade there. But, you know, for the most part, the S&P 500 has very small open interest. And companies that are

that are small in the S&P often times don't have any option market. Billion dollar, multi-billion dollar companies, there is no option market. And um by the way, if your strategy is get rid of all the volatility on the balance sheet, you'll never accidentally make $50 billion like Elon Musk does or like Jeff Bezos do. You'll never accidentally have anything you own trade up. And if your strategy is strip all the volatility from the P&L, we'll just sign our customers to three-year enterprise agreements and renew them a year in advance and put a CPI or PPI

escalator on it. Once you've done that, the question is, why would I bother to ever trade the stock? I could tune in once a year, make a decision, and forget about it. The only volatility you're getting in that case is negative volatility when something goes wrong. And this is how that strategy transforms the performance. Note that uh by stripping away the volatility from the P&L on the balance sheet, the companies also effectively strip away the performance. And uh you can see how my how our company strategy is an outlier here. There's a there's a few

uh sparks, but for the most part uh and again this is the top 500 companies were we're struggling. And another way to say it is uh most companies they're struggling to compete and they're dying slowly. 85% of the US listed companies have less than $10 million of options interest. 75% have less than $10 million in daily trading volume. 85% are destined to underperform the S&P 500. So if you're in one of those companies and or you're running a company or you hope to start a company, the issue is how do you break free? H how

do you actually overcome this structural disadvantage? Everybody in the world talks about AI. Um if you walk down the street and you asked a hundred people, do you think AI is a good idea? Most of them would say yes. Every CEO's got an AI plan. Every investor wants to know your AI strategy and uh it's sexy and it's fun and it's uh it's critical, but it's not the solution to the problem. AI is not the solution. Why? Well, first of all, because everybody agrees that you should use it. Everybody agree. It's a consensus idea. Everybody

agrees you should use AI to cut your cost, improve your products, and grow your business. We all agree on it. Well, that just means 400 million businesses are all agreeing to use the same technology to do the same thing at the same time, right? Where's your edge? Uh here's what's going to happen with AI. The rich are going to get richer. The famous are going to get more famous. The powerful will get more powerful. Right? This is going to be a big benefit to Microsoft and to Apple and to Google and and to all your

famous celebrities, you know, and to Tom Cruz. If you've got a famous brand, if you've got a distribution channel, you're the beneficiary. Th those with money and power. However, if you're trying to start something up, yeah, there'll be 10,000 AI startups, 100,000 AI startups. A few AI unicorns, and when I say unicorn, I mean one in 10,000 companies. There'll be a 99.9% failure rate or 99.99% failure rate. But you'll have some pure play AI unicorn startups and they will disrupt entire industries. They will destroy thousands of companies. They will change the world. You know, you'll

have robots making robots. You'll have someone launch some product to provide the work of 187,000 accountants. You'll have interesting things. Many will fail, but something will succeed. But here's the bad news. It's more likely that your company will be the victim of that trend than the beneficiary of that trend. At the end of the day, this is a steamroller. It's coming. But if you are not the unicorn and if you are not the digital monopoly or the most powerful company in your country or in your industry, then AI is feeding the rich and powerful. That's

not feeding you. It's just turning the screws to you. So consensus thinking, uh, it won't elevate the average company. Uh, AI, it's not that it's a bad idea, it's a good idea. AI is a necessary condition for success. You won't stay in business a decade from now if you haven't embraced it. There's no doubt. It's a necessary condition. It's just not sufficient. It is necessary, but not sufficient. You have to embrace it, but it's not going to save you. Bitcoin is the solution to the problem. And why? Well, because very few people agree. because most

people don't think it's the solution to the problem. Few agree that you should use Bitcoin to capitalize your business. Now, you don't have to take my word for it. You can literally go out on the street. You can ask a hundred wealthy, well-educated people. Go ask any, you know, business school professor. The majority will say, "Ah, it sounds risky. Not a good idea. Increases the risk." Um, you go ask the same people, "Should I use AI in my startup?" They're like absolutely. Okay. The consensus technology is digital intelligence. The paradigm shifting technology is digital capital.

Digital capital will save your company because everybody else doesn't understand it because the mainstream has not yet embraced it. You get to be first. Or in the words of Peter Teal, and this is the probably the most important most important quote I'm going to put on the screen today. Courage is in much shorter supply than genius. I can I can show you geniuses. I, you know, there's 8 billion people on the planet. You can find 8,000 people that are the smartest one in a million. You can't find 8,000 courageous businesses to do what I've described.

You might think that you've got an IQ200. You know what people with IQ200 do in this world? They come up with a hundred reasons to not buy Bitcoin. They come up with they they they can write books everything that can go wrong. Well, I can hypothetically imagine that this might be a problem 10 years down the road in that circumstance. And so that's why we'll not do it. People people lacking courage apply their brilliance to apologize for why they're not going to take the risk. And so this is not about being smart. This is actually

about having some courage. Success success comes from a willingness to acknowledge reality. I was just showing you some reality, right? Is your business going to all of a sudden start growing 20% a year forever and like grow past the magnificent seven? Well, again, if you haven't acknowledged that reality, then you won't embrace a new idea, right? You're not winning in the status quo. You need a paradigm shift. Embrace the new idea. Then you have to do the work. Doing the work requires a lot of study, a lot of research, a lot of careful planning. And

at some point after all that work, take a risk. And if you do take a risk, then you have to execute. But your path out of this is acknowledge reality, embrace the idea, do the work, take a risk, execute. And what's it mean to do the work? Well, you're going to you're doing work for 40 years of your life. You're working. That's you know, 80,000 hours of work to make money. The great irony is I every single person in the economy spends 80,000 hours working. Trying to get someone to spend a 100 hours to figure

out how to keep their money. That's actually challenging. But what I say is spend a 100 hours learning how to keep the money that you generated over 80,000. Now, if you're the CEO of a company with 10,000 employees, I want you to imagine 10,000 times 80,000 hours, working very hard, and then losing all the money. Well, practically speaking, that's what's going on in the world today. It's going on thousands of times everywhere in the economy. Spend a 100 hours learning to debunk the hundred criticisms people come up with. Well, I'm worried about this. I'm worried

about that. What if Satoshi is a CIA dude? What if Dr. Evil gets a quantum computer? What if what if, you know, often times when people get past the it's tulip bulbs, they go to this they go to the argument, well, you know, it's too good to be true, so the government's going to take it away from you. That's literally the the the gigabrain objection. It you're right. It's it will solve all my problems, but it's going to solve them so well, it's too good to be true. So somebody more powerful than me that hates

me will just take it away from me. So I think I'll just not try. After a bit of work, you conclude that money decomposes into capital and currency. Uh the conventional thinker will tell you money is a medium exchange, a unit account, a store of value, and they'll stop and they'll act like they just solved the problem. It's like this is why you don't want to teach people to brainlessly repeat stuff that they learned in school. Well, the truth of the matter is when you think about it, you realize that that high frequency money versus

low frequency money varies. So, if I want to spend the money for the next four weeks, I'm going to use the peso in Argentina. It's a super super high frequency money. uh if I want to hold the money for four weeks to four years, I'll use the dollar. It's the world's reserve currency. Those are mediums of exchange in the world. But if I want to hold the money for a decade to 40 years, I'm going to use an asset like real estate, like gold, like equity. And if I want to hold the money for 10

years to 100 years, I I better have a very durable asset, one that's going to last a hundred years. So when you put money on that spectrum, you can see that on one side is capital. It's uh it's long-term store of value money that I'm going to give to my children's children. And on the other side is currency. It's high frequency convenient medium of exchange money. And um once you get that, you realize there's a hierarchy of capital assets. I can use a weak currency to store my company's money. I can use a stronger sovereign

debt. I can use strong currency. I can use investment grade debt. I can have a 6040 portfolio. I can invest in the S&P index. I can buy a bunch of commercial real estate. And at the at top of that hierarchy, just about everyone that studies this concludes Bitcoin is better gold than gold. Bitcoin is better property than physical property. Bitcoin is a better tech equity investment than any company equity. Bitcoin is the the apex capital asset. And if you can't derive it from first principles, then you just look at the market indexes. And so here

I'm showing you the average performance of companies in each of these indexes. So look on the far right, that's the Russell 2000. If you're a Russell 2000 company and you generate cash flow and you buy your own stock back, you're generating a 5% return statistically, you would be better off to buy the S&P index than buy your own stock back. Right? If you're an S&P company and you buy the S&P index or if you buy your own stock back, you're on average you're generating a 10% return. the companies like uh the MAG 7 when they

buy their own stock back, they're actually outperforming the S&P because they outperform the S&P. So, they're capturing a 31% return, but nobody's capturing the 79% return of BTC. So, if you're that Russell 2000 company, instead of buying your stock back, buy Bitcoin. Instead of 5%, you get 79%. Right? Instead of divoting out your your cash flows, you bought Bitcoin. Yeah. You you know what you're doing when you do that? You're buying a company at one times revenue that's growing 79% a year. If I gave you the chance to buy a digital monopoly, a global digital

monopoly growing 80% a year for one times revenue with the cash, would you do it? Answer is everybody would do it. Everybody would do it. There's there's not a single company on earth that wouldn't buy a high growth monopoly growing 20 30 40 50 60 70 80% at one times revenue. Well, it's right there, right? That's the asset. You might think I cherry picked the numbers. Well, this is the 10-year performance slices for every 10-year period, you know, from 08 to 18 all the way to 2014 to 2025. And you can see Bitcoin is just

continually outperforming. The worst 10-year stretch it ever had was 50%. Well, what if you just hire the smartest money manager in the world to actually manage your money for you? Can can you outperform it with people with PhDs or look at the performance of all the endowments of the Ivy League? All of the money managers running the endowments of Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT, they're actually underperforming the S&P by 3%. That is to say, if they all stopped doing anything and you just put your money in the S&P, they would improve performance by

50%. Right? All of the gigab brains uh doing smart performance for the most part they they just can't beat the simple index. They're destroying value. And what you see is uh Bitcoin against all these strategies keeps just keeps beating it over long periods of time. There's nothing you can find here that's compelling. So what is Bitcoin? Well, Bitcoin is the best strategy. The best strategy for what? The best strategy to create shareholder value. The best strategy to grow your company, the best strategy to make money for your investors, the best strategy to keep your company

in business forever. What's the second best strategy? Uh, you could wiggle your nose and cast a spell and hope that you're Nvidia. What? There is no second best strategy, right? You've got one thing that's that's giving you 56% a year for the past five years or so. Uh if you look to the far right, what's the worst strategy? The worst strategy is buy longdated sovereign debt. Like long dated by the way, this is not quite the worst. The worst strategy is buy a weak currency or a collapsing currency or international bonds and a collapsing currency.

You're going to lose all your money in three to five years. That's the worst strategy. The worst strategy in the US is buy longdated uh treasuries. Uh who did that? uh Silicon Valley Bank did that. It bankrupted them. Most banks did that. They would all be insolvent if they weren't uh given a waiver by the Fed. Uh there's a an irony, of course, that the government actually mandates that banks use those treasuries as their capital asset. It turns out that um that regulations in the capital markets keep a company from capitalizing on securities. That's why

uh Google can't buy the S&P index. That's that's why companies can't buy portfolios of stock. That's what they knocked out of the system in 1933 with the SEC act. Uh there was, if you read uh Rothbard's conceived in Liberty, there was a lot of uh maneuvering politically in DC between the Rockefeller interest and the JP Morgan interest. And this was a big win for the Rockefeller interest against the JP Morgan interest. And it was and we had Roosevelt who was more of a central planner socialist and it was his way to put the bankers in

New York and the capitalists in their place and centralized control of the capital markets. And one simple way to do it is just make it illegal for a company, a public company to buy stock in another public company. Well, you look at the chart here and what you can see is that most companies would have been better off to have just bought gold and capitalized on gold. Gold's the 19th century store of value asset, but um of course they didn't they can't capitalize on the S&P 500 or the Magnificent 7. So what you have is

one strategy uh get zero yield with shortdated treasuries. the other strategy you get 55% or 56% with Bitcoin, you know, and I guess if you're a gold bug, you buy gold, but there's no cons there's no consensus there to do that and that's never happened. Now, Bitcoin happens to be the best performing uncorrelated asset. You can see the numbers, right? It's it's not correlated to risk asset. It's got the highest sharp ratio. And all of the things I've laid out have created a trend. And the trend is more and more public companies are beginning to

buy Bitcoin and put it on their balance sheet. Um, when we bought it in 2020, we were the first company to buy any material amount. Now you've got 70 publicly listed companies. You've got 68.5 billion dollars of Bitcoin. You've got more companies coming every week, every month, everywhere in the world. And that takes me to the micro strategy story. What is the micro strategy story? Well, in August of 2020, we faced reality. We had tried everything under the sun. Buybacks. We had tried spending massive money on marketing, massive money on sales, expanded our salesforce, expanded

our technology function. We launched, you know, dozens of new businesses. We've wound them down. every possible strategy you could. Uh, none of them worked. And when the lockdowns hit, we realized we were looking at a fast death or a slow death or we were going to have to take a risk. And so we decided to take a risk. And uh, when we did it, our stock was about $12 a share and $6 of that was cash. So the enterprise value of the company was $6. um when we did this slide is $394. So you can

see we could have sold the company for an enterprise value of $6 to $8 or we could go ahead and take a risk and embrace a new idea and uh we decided to do that. You can see our trading volume is 5 million a day. Our trading volume now is 5.9 billion a day, right? I mean, you could see our open interest was $1 million in the options market. Today, 90 96 billion when we took this snapshot. The we weren't volatile. We were very predictable, predictably uninteresting. Um, and the sad fact is we were actually

making a lot of money. We were generating $75 million a year in cash flow on a $500 million P&L or $500 million revenue stream. The company was that zombie company. You can't It's not It's not poorly run. It's wellrun. It's just you're competing head-to-head with Microsoft and Microsoft has a chokeold on every business on Earth. I would submit to you it would be easier for you if you were an American company. It would be easier for you to leave the United States than it would be for you to leave Microsoft. Think about it, right? All

right. I mean, that's how powerful that company is. And so we started with a $250 million commitment and um we persisted and over time the capital markets rewarded us with 26 billion dollars of additional equity. In fact, we were we were able to raise 37.5 billion dollars of capital starting with a $250 million commitment, right? Clarity, conviction, courage, commitment. Move forward. The the world wants you to win the world. What you what you will find is your customers will get behind you. Your investors will get behind you. the capital markets will get behind you. Um,

these mag seven stocks, right, that that basically dominate everything. Most investors, they're overexposed to them and so they would like to find something else to invest in. And you know what? Do you know what the CFOs of the great companies of the world brag about? They brag about surrendering their capital. They basically brag about how much stock they're going to buy back this year. So, what they're saying is, "We created the world's greatest company and we've got all this money, but we don't know what to do with it, and so we're just going to give

it back." So, you're the investor and you're getting showered with hundreds of billions of dollars a year of capital from Microsoft and Apple and Nvidia. You have to put it somewhere. And so, what I'm saying and what what our company became was a place for the capital to flow. And this is where being non- consensus thinker makes a difference. See why every other great company that you love that's well-run is doing their best to get rid of their money. Someone the investors have to invest it somewhere. So our business strategy is to collect money, right?

We're actually positively polarized to the capital. We're attracting it. These other companies are negatively polarized the capital. They're repelling it. And you can see that manifested in 2024 where a company that had uh 500 million in revenue in 2020 and and we could maybe generate 50 to 70 million in earnings a year. We raised $22.6 billion last year. And you can see this year we raised 10.1 billion year to date. Who's giving us this money? Investors. Why? Because they want to make money. Why? Because Apple doesn't want their money. Meta doesn't want their money. Nvidia

doesn't want their money. Okay? All these, you know, all of these great companies don't want their money. And then all the other companies can't beat the monopolies. You're not going to want to give them your money. I want to actually invest in this unicorn, this digital monopoly that's hyperrowth, that's fast, and I want to put my money there. Well, what I'm saying is you can make your company that digital monopoly if you do a merger with Bitcoin. And that's what our company did. We did a merger with Bitcoin. And and the great thing about this

merger is you're merging, you know, at one times revenue. And every and you can reverse it. You know, you can buy 100 million, you can buy 10 million, you can buy a billion, you can next year you can buy another 500 million, you can buy 20 million. If you're a cab driver in Nigeria, you could buy $27 worth. You can merge with Bitcoin as much or as little as you want. It's a reversible transaction. The fees are quite reasonable. And the return, well, here's how we perform against everybody else. And um it's what I say.

Um if you want to 10x your money, you buy Bitcoin. If you want a 100 extra money, you buy Bitcoin with someone else's money. If you want a thousand extra money, you buy Bitcoin with someone else's money and then you leverage the Bitcoin. It's not complicated. It's not even risky in my opinion. It's just novel. And so that's what we did. And this is the result in four and a half years. And what you can see is is uh the only company that outperformed Bitcoin over this time period is is Nvidia. You have to invent

intelligence. All 499 of the other companies, every other company on Earth underperforms Bitcoin except for Nvidia. And um if you can copy Nvidia, have at it. But if you can't copy Nvidia, you can merge and you can be Bitcoin. And then once you've uh once you've merged an operating company with Bitcoin, the way you outperform is by being public and issuing equity or credit instruments and taking advantage of the fact that securities are treated uh better than commodities in the investor markets. We we haven't just outperformed over the past uh four and a half years.

We've uh outperformed the last year. So this is the last 12 months. Yeah, you think the strategy is running down, not quite running down. You can see what happens if you actually capitalize on Bitcoin. The S&P is up 12%. We're up 249%. Uh, you know, our eternal champion bonds up 2%. Right? And and by the way, you can be a great company like Google's a great company, that's no guarantee the stock's going to perform. At the end of the day, the problem with companies is they have tax surfaces. They have a lot of complexity. They

get tariffs. They get antirust actions. They get unionized. Ultimately, every every force on Earth is trying to drag the company's performance back to the mean. It's trying to actually drag you back and and the more successful you are, the bigger the target you are. That's why it makes so much sense to partner with a decentralized network that doesn't have a CEO. Well, what about the last uh 12 weeks? Well, we've gone through the tariff tantrum. Um, guess what doesn't get tariffed, right? Bitcoin. No tariffs on Bitcoin, right? Or another way to say it is all

these companies are struggling because they do a lot of stuff. And to paraphrase the Dow of Steve, doing stuff is highly overrated. Okay? The more stuff you do, the more exposure you have to fire and flood and war and tariff and supply chain and regulatory action and politics, etc., etc., etc. So, if you look at this report card, what's happened? Well, right now we have the over the last five years, we have the number one uh return out of the S&P 500 universe. We've got the number one options market in the entire crypto complex. The

number one return um you know over over the Bitcoin standard era, the number one volatility, uh the number one options market is a function of market cap, the number one Bitcoin position and you can see you know our trading volumes are six billion a day. Now the other why else is this going to work for your company? Because companies can do something uh that individuals and trusts can't do. Institutions can't do this. Uh families can't do this. Companies can issue securities. Companies can issue credit securities like convertible bonds, like uh junk bonds, like investment grade

bonds, like preferred stock, like equity, like warrants. These securities are in high demand. What you can see from this chart is the one way to turbocharge a bond is uh back it with Bitcoin. So our convertible bonds have a blended performance of 62% that outperforms Bitcoin. If you're buying Bitcoin, you're buying the most volatile asset, most volatile commodity in the world. And yet you can beat that volatile commodity with a credit instrument that gives you downside protection. And that's that's pretty amazing because if you want to compare that to the S&P index or the NASDAQ,

you can see it's five, six, 7x. But look at the other bonds in the world. You know, high yield bonds that are issued by companies that don't have any money that are struggling to scrape cash flows. they underperform by, you know, in this case 7% versus 62 by 85%. Look at other convertible bonds, right? It's not just issuing a convertible bond. It's like you want to issue a convertible bond with a crypto reactor in the middle. You you want a energy source, a volatility source in it and a performance source, right? Um and so simple

converts are 4% performance instead of 62. And then investment grade bonds 1% you see. So we're we're able to do this because we're a public company. Your company can do this too. And then you look at this risk return matrix. The other thing an operating company can do is it can create equity which is volatile which gets traded and then people will actually want to buy all the other credit instruments in order to get the upside with less downside. So what you can see here is all these convertible bonds and our preferred stock. It provides

you with upside but less downside than the common equity. So for the risk adverse investors, you're providing them an on-ramp to the crypto economy, right? They you can give them 10% of the of the risk, 20, 30, 40, 50%. You can give them half the volatility. You can uh you can give them guaranteed yields. And uh there's a massive market for that. When you adopt a Bitcoin standard, you're able to create Bitcoinbacked securities. And there's $500 trillion of fiatbacked conventional securities in the market. I just showed you all the equity underperforms. I could show you

other slides that would show you all the credit instruments, all the preferred stocks, all the investment grade bond, they underperform, right? the preferred stocks are bought by people and and they're just shoved in a portfolio, you know, going nowhere. You know, you're just waiting to die, right? There's nothing that's going to happen there. And the equity is like everybody knows there's a 90% chance my equity won't work out. They don't want to play the game. You have to change the game. So, why don't we move on to the Microsoft story? What is the greatest company

in the world? Probably Microsoft. Mic, if you look at Microsoft over the past year, two years, five years, 10 years, what do they sell? They basically license business process to every major company on earth. What's their what you know hardware? No hardware dependency. They can swap out, you know, the silicon. They don't have a difficult supply chain. Nobody can turn them off and their customers are all very creditw worthy and they can they sell you three or enterprise licenses and when it's time for you to buy their latest teams or their latest whatever Microsoft product

they just add it to your enterprise agreement and you agree to take it because you don't have a choice right and it's a well-run super profitable high growth company whatever bad happens to them they're just going to raise the prices to their existing uh customers and pass it through and everybody will pay it. So that's Microsoft. I had the opportunity to to present uh the Bitcoin the case for Bitcoin to Microsoft about um four months ago or in December and uh I made the following points. It was to put this in perspective. This was on

it was a shareholder resolution and the resolution says we think that Microsoft should investigate the feasibility of a Bitcoin treasury strategy. Right? That was the resolution. Do a research study on Bitcoin. And so there was a chance to present to the board of directors for three minutes and I put this together and and what I said to them was look uh you don't want to mix the next you don't want to miss the next wave. Digital capital is the next wave. The way you know it's the next wave is because it's growing 62% a year.

It's going to grow past you in a bit. It's the most global interesting asset in the world. Hundreds of millions of people are talking about it. The greatest digital transformation of the 21st century is the transformation of capital. You're supposed to be in the digital transformation business. This is the transformation of capital, right? Global wealth is spread across $900 trillion of assets. Bitcoin is two trillion. Most capital is divided between long-term capital, that's the store of value assets you just hold to keep your money, and then other assets held for utility. the stuff that the

building you need to work in, the warehouse, the working farm, the thing the stock you're holding for dividends. When you see the world that way, what you realize is the risk factors are destroying the long-term capital, right? They're your your capital is being destroyed by taxes, by inflation, by tariffs, by insurance, by tors, culture shocks, regulation, antirust. I every single 10K has got 30 pages of these disclosures in them. And so that long-term capital, it's transforming into digital capital because there's no fires in cyberspace. There's no hurricanes in cyerspace. There's no tariffs in cyberspace. There's

no war in cyberspace. Why don't you just move your money someplace where some politicians is not going to take it away from you or some war isn't going to deprive you of it or lightning's not going to strike it? Because at the end of the day, Bitcoin succeeds based on a simple premise. A bunch of smart people in the world would like to keep their money. Period. That's the idea, right? Who's buying it? The smart money. The smart money everywhere in the world is buying a digital network to keep their money. That's the idea. Digital

capital is uh it's better a digital building is better than a physical building. Everything you hate about the building that it's visible and the mayor can rent control it and weather can strike it. Everything you hate about it goes away and instead the building becomes invisible and destructible, immortal and teleportable. Everything that makes it better you add in. Everything you don't like you goes away. Bitcoin is the immortal asset. It's the asset that lasts a thousand years. You want to keep your money 10 years, you want to keep your money three years, you buy a

crappy currency. You want to keep it 10 years, buy a strong currency. You want to keep it 50 years, buy some kind of company or equity and worry about it for 50 years or buy some property. What if you want to keep your money 500 years? How do you do that? You can't do it with any conventional asset. You can do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the longest lived capital asset in the history of the world. How many people want to be rich forever, right? I mean, why wouldn't you want to be rich forever? Bitcoin represents

economic immortality. It represents uh the quest to make my company live not a decade. The average life expectancy of a company, by the way, is like 10 to 15 years. You're, you know, if your kids died at age 12, right? You don't think that's a health problem? So, what if I told you the reason your kids die at age 12 is they drink dirty water? And I said the solution is drink clean water and they'll live to age 90. Would you change like the money is the current the money is the fluid is you know

you you're running on toxic capital and you want to live forever you need clean money. So what do we see? We see a an industry that's growing from two trillion to 200 trillion. You know when when Bitcoin is a $200 trillion asset, what is it? Okay. Well, it's still going to be smaller than equity and real estate and bonds. It's just going to be noticeable. It's going It's the emerging global monetary asset. It is digital gold. It is 10 times better than gold, maybe a hundred times better than gold. And it is the most powerful

secure computer network in the world. It's fitting in the 21st century if you want to create a digital commodity, you put it on a computer network, you protect it with electricity, you protect it with computer power, and you spread it to everybody everywhere on Earth. That's what Bitcoin is. It is digital capital. Everything digital is better. Digital pictures are better. Digital relationships, digital messages, digital documents, digital videos. Digital is always better. Right? Hey, you don't believe me? Ask Kodak, right? It's like digital is better, right? Ask Polaroid. Um, Microsoft should be powered by digital capital.

And Bitcoin is the highest performing uncorrelated asset. So, you're going to hold something on your balance sheet that's not correlated to everything else. So, let's look at the charts. Microsoft is up 18% a year for the past five years. Bitcoin's up 62%. What's the cost of capital? The cost of capital is the S&P 500. It's 14%. That's what you're judged against. How are bonds doing? They're down 5%. Now, what if I normalize this against the cost of capital? So, what you can see is if S&P 500 is the baseline, Microsoft is outperforming the S&P by

4% a year. Bitcoin is outperforming by 48% a year. and bonds are underperforming by 19% a year. So, Bitcoin is outperforming. You know, Microsoft is going to do a buyback. Buying Bitcoin would be 10x better than buying your own stock. What happens? What happens if you uh is there a way to go back here? Can you move the slide back? I guess got no back button. Okay. Um well uh in any event uh if if Microsoft buys uh bonds, you're destroying [Music] 99.7% of your capital over 10 years, right? That's the problem. Bonds are toxic.

But buying your own stock destroys 97% of your capital. So you're going to destroy 97% of your capital buying the stock of MS of MSFT versus buying the Bitcoin. And if you want to outperform, you want to reverse the transaction. You put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. What's the secondary impact of capitalizing on bonds? Because that's what Microsoft does. It decapizes. It gets rid of all of its cash flow and it uses bonds for short-term as its primary treasury asset. So the result is you reduce your options open interest by 98%. Compare the open interest

in MSTR to the interest in Microsoft 98% less. You reduce the liquidity in your stock by 99%. What they're doing is they're they're denuring the company, right? But you're you're not realizing it. Who's losing? the people holding the equity are losing because because this the equity becomes much weaker collateral. If it's not volatile, then it's not as valuable to hold and if it's not liquid, then it's not as good collateral to hold. And Bitcoin, of course, emerged as the alternative to bonds in 2024. That was the point at which the SEC endorsed the Bitcoin ETFs.

That's the point at which you could see Fazby Fair Value Accounting was coming. That was kind of year zero. We're now in year one. There's basically there's three if you define money as a liquid fungeable asset. There's three monies that you can use to capitalize a company in this world today. There is treasury bills, sovereign debt that is, but generally shortdated treasury bills. There's gold and there's Bitcoin. You know, you've got 19th century money in gold. That was the best idea in the 19th century, gold. You've got 20th century money in treasuries and sovereign debt.

And Bitcoin represents 21st century money, liquid fungeable capital asset alternative to bonds. And so you have a choice to make at Microsoft. You can cling to the past which is conventional finance strategies. Use treasury bonds, do stock buybacks, dividend out your cash flow. Or you can embrace the future. You can take innovative financial strategies based on Bitcoin as a digital capital asset. The first choice is a regression. You're divesting yourself of a hundred billion dollars a year. You're increasing investor risk and you're slowing your own growth rate. The second choice is a progression. You're investing

a hundred billion a year in your enterprise. You're decreasing the risk. You're accelerating the growth. If you look over the last five years, Microsoft surrendered $200 billion of capital. They literally won it. How many companies on earth ever generated $200 billion in after tax cash flow? Right? It's like it's got to be one of the 10 greatest achievements ever. They won and they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They took the money and what they do with it? Give it away. What are we really doing? Well, we're divoting it out. That's one way to

get away and we'll buy our stock back. That's another way to give it away. What happens when you do that? You amplify the risk factors and your own perspectives for your own shareholders. you are now facing all these are actual risks that Microsoft publishes to the world. These are the risks that the world's greatest company takes. Every investor has to assume these risks if they want to use uh Microsoft stock as a long-term store of value. What Microsoft did was they made sure they had $200 billion less capital to deal with the risks and they

probably decreased their enterprise value dramatically. So you're actually levering the company on the future risk. How do you escape the vicious cycle? When you get that much risk, you know what you do? Um you put massive pressure on your employees. Then you put massive pressure on your customers. Then you force your customers to buy products for three years when they only want one year. You force them to buy everything when they only want some things. And uh you lever your competitors. They complain to the regulators and the politicians. you get sued, everybody gets angry, then

you go and you engage in the political process. It's it's a very divisive, stressful dynamic. And if you were to sit in the boardroom of Microsoft and say, "Well, why do you have to force everyone to sign a three-year contract or whatever the answer is?" Because we get a lot of risk when we're trying to strip the volatility off of the earnings forecast for 12 months from now. Well, Bitcoin is the asset without that counterparty risk. If you want to get away from counterparty risk to competitors, countries, corporations, creditors, currencies, or cultures, you got to

find something that's not exposed to any of them, and that's Bitcoin. So, if you could buy a hundred billion dollar company growing 60% a year at one times revenue, and if it was more profitable than your own company, would you do it? Of course you would. What if you could do it every year forever? Right? Bitcoin is the universal perpetual profitable merger partner. And I and I'll tell you the conventional investment banker will tell you when you're when you've lost hope in your business, you either do an LBO and you take yourself private or you

got to do a transformational acquisition. and they're pitching you on buying something at five times revenue or 10 times revenue that's not growing. I'm giving you something which is dirt cheap. One times revenue that's growing 30 to 60% a year, right? It doesn't get better than this. The great irony, it's the least risky corporate acquisition imaginable. And there's perception by the consensus that it's risky. So, let's evaluate Microsoft's options, right? There is a Bitcoin 24 model. You can grab it from GitHub, pull it down, plug your own business into it. We plugged into the Microsoft

business. We plugged in their cash flows. And then we actually put together a set of scenarios. We said, well, what if you just sweep your cash flows and a little bit of cash and some treasury into it? Or what if you actually eliminated the dividend and you bought Bitcoin instead of paying the dividend? What if you replace the the buyback of your stock with the buyback of Bitcoin? What if you actually took 10 a little thin layer of debt, you know, like 10% of all the Bitcoin you own, you put on debt, and then what's

the payoff? And the answer is it adds anywhere from $155 to $584 a share to the company, right? That's the share price creation. By doing what? By taking less risk. I'm asking you to add anywhere from$1 trillion to$5 trillion to the enterprise value of the company and take less risk and how you know and all you have to do is stop giving away the money stop surrendering the capital see most equities are based upon the future expectation of cash flows if you look at Microsoft 95% of the equity value is future expectation Well, if you

start to buy Bitcoin, the equity value is backed by a hard asset and eventually 41% or more of the value of the company is based on a tangible asset. You know, rich people aren't rich because of a future expectation of cash flows. They're rich because they own assets, right? I would rather be invested in a rich company than be invested in a company that gives away all their money but promises to work ever harder and raise the prices on their customers at infin item. Right? Think think about it. It's not a good look. We work

harder, we cut our cost, our customers pay more so that we can support the stock. It's a it's a road to surfom in a way. And so Microsoft would prosper on a Bitcoin standard. You can see here your your ARR, you know, goes from 10% growth rate to nearly 16%. You're increasing the growth of the company. You're decreasing value at risk. You're creating value. You're increasing, you're derisking the entire equity. All you have to do is embrace a new capital idea. So, do the right thing. It's good for your customers, good for your employees, good

for your shareholders, good for the country, good for the world, good for your legacy. Adopt Bitcoin. That That's my pitch to Microsoft. But what I would say is I didn't do all this work just for Microsoft. I did this work because everything I just showed you would be applicable to every other company on Earth. Doesn't matter how big or small you are. It's the same exact message to 400 million companies. But for those of you who have have followed me, you know there are 21 rules of Bitcoin. And I'm going to note rule number 11.

Bitcoin insight is restricted to those with a need to know. You have to need to know this. So when this came up to a vote, 99% of all the shareholders of Microsoft voted against a proposal to invest or to study the feasibility of doing this. 99%. This is what I mean by consensus and to and of course why the answer is it's the most powerful company on earth right they don't need it they don't need the money you need the money right and that's the beauty of this entire thing Microsoft didn't have a need to

know and so I end this with just one question for you does your company have a need to know and what will be your Bitcoin story thank [Applause]