Michael Saylor: Why Bitcoin Q A Session | Bitcoin 2025

Michael, thank you for being here with us. We are taking questions from the audience. We'll kick it off.

I hear there's about a hundred people standing outside. So, uh, congratulations to all of you for making it in the room. Next year, we'll find a bigger stage.

Uh, all right, let's go with the first one. Uh, you've mentioned that simply holding Bitcoin is enough, but would you ever consider building something like a Bitcoin bank, or does that go against your philosophy? Um, a bank is a is a regulated or it's a reserve term in u western civilization.

So, right now it means a company that uh takes, you know, business or retail deposits. It's regulated. Um, if you're a regulated bank, you might actually be prevented from doing other financial things.

So, we don't have any plans to be a bank. Um we're much more enthusiastic uh about uh pioneering the world of Bitcoinbacked credit instruments. You we want to have you know the premier Bitcoin backed equity and bitcoinbacked credit.

And so it's it's it's a set of financial products but not a bank. Right. That makes sense.

All right. Michael, a lot of people believe in diversification but you've gone all in on Bitcoin. What gives you such strong conviction in that choice?

Well, Bitcoin's the only digital commodity and if you're going to be a public company, then you need to be capitalized on a commodity and Bitcoin is the first uh commodity in the history of the world that outperforms the S&P index on a consistent basis. So, uh if you are a public company, it's a very simple choice. Uh there's one best asset and there is no second best asset, right?

Um Got it. Got it. So I mean I I'm an aeronautical engineer.

I have conviction in Bitcoin like you have conviction in using aluminum to build an airplane. And the reason you use aluminum to build an airplane is because if you use steel, the plane won't fly. Uh, so Bitcoin works for a public company because it's higher performance than the S&P and it's more volatile than the S&P and it's a commodity and so you can go to 100% leverage and every mathematical model you can possibly work through indicates that the right answer is 100% Bitcoin.

If you diversify that, all you're doing is bleeding off diluting the volatility which devalues the options. When you go when you go from 100 V to 40 V, your options market would go to from a 100 billion to a billion. So you're going to destroy your own options market.

And if you uh dilute the Bitcoin with anything else, you would destroy your performance. And so on a the first order answer is it makes no sense because the options are destroyed and the equity is destroyed. The second order answer is you can't build uh a Bitcoin backed convertible bond or Bitcoinbacked convertible preferred stock or Bitcoinbacked fixed income preferred stock if you're not Bitcoin backed.

Right? And so if Berkshire Hathway, for example, were to buy a hundred billion dollars worth of Bitcoin tomorrow, they might have more Bitcoin than us, but they couldn't issue equity and credit instruments that have Bitcoin's performance because they would be diversified. And uh and so at the end of the day uh it makes sense for us to be 100% Bitcoin because it gives you the first order best result and then all of the securities that we build inherit the volatility and the performance of Bitcoin and uh and we would in essence be destroying we're crippling our own securities and crippling our own performance to diversify.

Why? I love that. I want to go a little bit off script because you said something.

You said uh uh there is no second best, right? That's a meme that you created. You have a couple of them.

Uh it's going up forever. Laura, uh all your models are destroyed. Couple of my favorites.

You guys bought uh 420 with a zero in between uh of Bitcoin yesterday. You guys talk about the importance of of marketing and and memes and mimetics uh in your guys' boardroom. How important is that to what you guys are doing?

Um, I think I think we live in a world of abundance and there are more messages and there's more entertainment. You can sit and you can watch Magnus Carlson chess videos and you can almost watch an infinite number of commentators commenting on the same chess game by Magnus Carlson. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, there's infinite everything.

Infinite enter entertainment, infinite message, infinite news. And everybody's overwhelmed and bombarded. And so it's important that if you have a message that you uh that you condense it down to something which is very efficient.

Um people don't have time to read 30 pages. They don't have time to read two pages. They probably don't have time to read two paragraphs, right?

Um, if I were to write a book on why Bitcoin is the superior investment asset, 0. 1% of the people would read the book in a decade. If I simply said there is no second best.

Amen. And if I can get like a three-year-old kid with a beard to say there's no second best, like baby sailor can get the point across a million times as efficiently. And uh and so I I think that these are important because you just can't spread the information efficiently enough unless you put it into a viral package.

Amen. Love that. All right, we got Yes, absolutely.

A lot of questions uh came in about MNAV. A lot of people curious about this. So, do you think it's possible for MNAV to drop below one in a bare market?

And if it does, how would that impact your strategy? Yeah, I I I think an important point on that is is I sometimes I see like uh Twitter analysts saying, "Oh, this is just like GBTC and Grayscale went below one times NAV before. " And uh what they miss is that Grayscale was a trust company, a closedin trust, and we're an operating company.

And a trust company doesn't have the option uh to refinance or take on leverage or or to sell securities, buy securities, recapitalize or buy their own stock back. And so when you you should think of a trust company is uh no I'm gonna I'm going to pick the wrong metaphor and people will hate me. Uh it's it's just a form of corporate entity that has uh no operational flexibility to manage its capital structure.

Operating companies have much more flexibility. uh we can buy stock, sell stock, recapitalize, we can take on debt to fix uh or to close a gap. So at the end of the day, I I think that um the one example people have in the crypto market, Grayscale, trading below NAV, was because it was a trust, not an operating company.

Um theoretic wait here when an operating company or a company doing something trades below NAV it's because the investors have lost faith in the management team and they think the management team is destroying shareholder value by acting irrationally. So, for example, if if I were to give myself a billion dollar a year pay package and announce it, the stock would dive and people would say, "What if I just said, "Hey, I have $64 billion of Bitcoin. I'm going to pay myself a billion dollars a year for the next 64 years.

" People would lose faith in the company. They would say, "The management team is looting the shareholders. " They dump the stock.

The stock would trade below NAV. It's because the management team is doing something out of alignment with the interest of the shareholders that the stock would trade below NAV. Now, having said all of that, um we can we constructed the company so that the company can generate yield and generate gains even at NAV or below NAV.

For example, we have $64 billion of Bitcoin. If the stock were to trade to a dollar tomorrow, well, we wouldn't sell the equity. Duh.

We would just sell the preferred stock. We would be selling stock overcolateralized 10 to1 against Bitcoin with a 10% yield. And we would generate billions of dollars of gains selling the preferred or the fixed income instrument.

At some point, people would say, "Wow, uh, they're generating gains anyway. " And then the value would come back into the equity. Or we would, uh, we would sell, you know, you sell a preferred stock.

it I if someone's stupid enough to short my stock to a dollar, I would sell a billion dollars of the preferred and I would buy back the common stock, right? And I would just recapitalize the company, right? And then the common stock would fly through the roof and then they would be complaining that we bought the thing that they were selling.

So operating companies can do this. Trust companies, trust funds, ETFs, they can't do this. a closedin trust can't do what I describe.

So, so the way that I see the world and the way that we see the world is is when someone irrationally misprices something, then we if it's if it's mispriced too low, we buy it. And if it's, you know, and if it's priced at a massive premium, we might sell it not to drive the price down, but just to capture the premium. And we construct all the preferred.

So that this pref I sell this preferred to people want US dollar yield. I sell this preferred to people that want convertible. I sell this preferred to people that want JP Japanese yield.

I'll sell this thing to someone that might want a euro yield. I will I will create this for people that want uh leverage. And um and ultimately we're creating value.

And if if um if one of the securities trades weak, we either stop selling it or we reverse it and start buying it. And um and the and and if you if you don't go to bis business school, then I'll boil it down to one sentence. Here's business school.

Keep your options open, right? That's what you learn in business school. And how do you create value?

You have to generate option value. So you would say, well, why do you have that preferred and this preferred and why do you do this some days and not do it other days? We're we're generating optionality.

The more optionality we generate, the more opportunity we have. The um the strife product, one day someone will start to talk about interest rates collapsing. Maybe there'll be someone writing a story about how the Federal Reserve is under pressure to lowest interest rates and sulfur will dive or the forward interest rate curve will dive and strife will trade up.

And it's it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It has nothing to do with our equity. It has nothing to do with the MNAV.

It has to do with people's opinion of whether or not Jerome Powell is going to change his something. And so we're creating optionality into the credit market. like someone else will say, "Well, I think the S&P is going to start to provide a credit rating for Bitcoin companies like MSTR and then the price of those things will readjust and there'll be a huge surge of demand and we will I if we have an ATM when that surge of demand comes, we can sell 10 billion dollars in a week.

If we don't have an ATM and that surge of demand comes, we sell nothing in a week and we talk to some bankers for four weeks and then by the time we do something, the opportunity is lost. So the thing that makes our company a monster is having multiple ATMs in multiple capital markets. All of them correlated to different forecast like your forecast of interest rates, your forecast of Bitcoin volatility, your forecast of of uh Bitcoin itself, your forecast of crypto policy, all of those futures are changing all the time.

We're straddling that future and we're able to either buy or sell or hedge any of them in real time. A million, 10 million, a hundred million or a billion, right? And sometimes you do nothing for like you could do nothing for a month or two months and then you could do two billion dollars in two hours, right?

So, and maybe you'll do something, you know, consistently, but we we've built the business uh to straddle the crypto economy and the traditional finance economy and to and to monetize volatility and uh and we're pretty thoughtful about how we do it. So, I you know, and this is the joke, if you're a closedin trust and you trade below mat nav, that's death. If you're an operating company and we trade below NAV, we just get to monetize that.

That's good for me, right? I mean, arguably the more irrational the market it is, the better it. If you were to short our stock down to 10% of NAV, we would make billions and billions of dollars a day, right?

And so we have a very anti-fragile structure and uh and and I think we're pretty optimistic about the prospects there because I'm quite sure the market will stay volatile. Yeah. All right.

Cool. Well, let's keep going. We uh our clock is out, but hey, can I get another like 12 minutes?

I think we're we're running a little early. We want to get through some more questions. Um as long as that's good with everybody here, we'll keep keep rolling.

All right, cool. All right, Michael. Do you see Bitcoin starting as a store of value and eventually becoming a global currency like other forms of money have in the past?

I I think if you read um if you read the history of the Rothschilds, the greatest bankers of uh the 19th century, they had a network. The Rothschild banks were the network. the the the primary uh asset capital asset that traded was sovereign debt.

They were trading UK debt and French debt and German debt par value 100. And they move those those instruments bearer bonds around very rapidly. And then they and that's how the entire banking network worked in the 19th century.

And then when they did cash settlement, you know what cash settlement meant? Cash settlement for the Rothschilds in the 19th century. And but I bring this up because uh Bitcoin's a peer-to-peer cash system, right?

And all these people like they're always tweeting at me like you don't understand what peer-to-peer cash is. Okay. When the Rothschilds cash settled a bear bond transaction in the 19th century, that meant they traded the bonds for gold bullion or gold coin.

And so cash meant gold. It meant metallic money either in bullion form or in uh coin form. But even then uh gold was too slow and too cumbersome to settle very frequently.

And so there was a fiat currency, these bonds trading over the cash system, the go in the gold standard all through the century. And I think it's important because if you look at Bitcoin today, Bitcoin's digital gold, it's digital cash. What does it mean?

It's a bearer instrument, a monetary instrument. What do I think is going to happen? I think it's going to keep growing from a trillion to 10 trillion to 100 trillion.

is going to keep getting bigger and bigger in the capital stack. And I think other forms of money, fiat currencies will continue. You're going to have sovereign debt, corporate debt, other type municipal debt.

As long as you have cities, they'll issue debt. As long as you have countries, they'll issue debt. As long as you have companies, they'll issue debt.

As long as you have families and they want to buy a house, they'll issue debt. Mortgage back debt. You're going to have all these forms of credit when people cash settle.

The settlement network will be Bitcoin. Was the world built on a gold standard in the 19th century? Yes, gold.

But what circulated? Sovereign debt. Will the world be on a Bitcoin standard in the 21st century?

Yes. What will circulate? Every form of credit of every creditworthy counterparty.

And then on top of that, equity, layers of equity from public company, private equity, and you'll have all sorts of other collectibles. I don't see a world where that disappears. I don't see a world where it needs to disappear.

And so I just I see a world where there are many types of assets but the king apex asset the root asset which everything else is settled on or everything else is uh is oriented to the center of gravity of the financial universe of the 21st century emerging is Bitcoin. Just like sorry that falls toward the center of gravity which is the middle of the earth and none of you have been there. That doesn't mean that it doesn't control everybody, right?

Everything will be oriented in a frame of reference. All right. All right.

Let's talk about AI. Elon said, "AI could 10x global GDP, and we know some of the value will flow into Bitcoin. " So, if GDP grows that much, does that massively increase Bitcoin's terminal value in your view?

uh in classical economics they talk about the economy being driven by land, labor and capital. The the consequences of AI AI is digital intelligence. Bitcoin is digital capital.

The consequences of the AI is that the AI is going to do the work of a billion people, then 10 billion people, then a hundred billion people, then a trillion people. Then that AI will go into robots and the robots will do the manual labor of a billion people and then 10 10 billion people and then the then it will go into your cars and your appliances and everything and and so what's happening we're going to digitally transform labor and the demand for labor as we know it is going to change fall the robots don't need as much space as we need and the AIs don't need any space so the demand Demand for land as an input to the economy will fall by a factor of 10. The demand for labor as an input to the economy will fall by a factor of 100.

What's left? Capital. Capital's going to explode.

You know, you're going to have massively valuable companies that a million robots creating a million robots with like 22 employees that are worth trillions of dollars. don't need the land, don't need the labor, have the money. Where's the capital going to flow?

It's going to flow into the Bitcoin, right? I mean, if you create extreme wealth, right? There's going to be two types of people.

There's going to be the people that bought the Bitcoin and they're going to be privately wealthy and they're going to live off of that or something something that is denominated in Bitcoin, right? And then there's going to be everybody that's getting that's getting wealth redistributed to them by political systems. Uh there won't be a lack of stuff.

There'll be infinite stuff. It'll be redistributed in a political economic process which will be interesting. But the consequences of AI is that it's going to create massive amount of capital.

And the capital that you're going to want is digital capital because it's the best capital and it's the most useful capital. When the AI thinks a million times a second and trades with another AI a million times a second, they're going to trade with Bitcoin. They're going to trade with digital capital a million and a billion times faster.

They're definitely not swapping buildings. They're definitely not swapping gold bonds, bars, or coins. They're definitely not going to trust anybody else's sovereign credit.

They're not going to trust private credit, public credit, sovereign debt. They're not going to use cash. they're going to use pure digital capital in cyerspace.

So, it's all bullish for Bitcoin uh and it's going to drive the price of Bitcoin up. And it, you know, if you haven't figured out how to make money by uh putting AI into your business, that's hard. Then I give you the easy answer.

You just buy the Bitcoin as much as you can buy because we know where all the money is going to eventually go. the capital is all going to flow in the Bitcoin network and the and the more everything else grows the more Bitcoin is going to grow. So you could just go right there and then wait for the world to enrich you.

All right, very very bullish. Okay, I think we have time for one more. By the way, this is all stream of consciousness.

There was no prep. Michael didn't get these questions ahead of time. People are texting them in.

So uh thank you for participating. So Michael, uh we started this initiative last year. Accelerating corporate Bitcoin adoption is is the mission.

Uh this person asked a great question question. Prescott, is there a point where one entity holding too much Bitcoin creates negative effects on the network or reduces its utility? No, I think the network is the protocol is protected by the des the distribution of the mining, the distribution of the the protocol itself, the distribution of the nodes, the distribution of the holders, the distribution of the exchanges and the distribution of the derivatives and the distribution of the regulatory bodies on top of it.

That's a global phenomena. um one company you know what if Black Rockck holds 3% or 2% of the Bitcoin or if if strategy holds two or three or four or 5% of the Bitcoin it doesn't matter because the price of Bitcoin went from 10,000 to 100,000 while we were pursuing that 2% and that meant that while we pursued that by the way technically if you go to sailor tracker you will find that that all of the work that we've done to get to two and a half percent resulted in like a $23 billion gain for us. 23 billion, but it resulted in a $2.

2 trillion gain for everybody else. Okay. So, like it's not like I got the money, right?

What is the ratio of $2 trillion? someone else has $2 trillion and we we made 20 billion and we have this small little piece. So it's like when when Wall Street is 5% of Bitcoin, that means 95% of the two and a half trillion is not Wall Street.

When Wall Street is 10% of Bitcoin, Bitcoin will be at a million a coin. And that means there'll be nearly$20 trillion dollars of not Wall Street money that will be sitting everywhere else in the rest of the world in the rest of whatever, right? The energy, it's impossible for anybody to take over Bitcoin in a hostile way because the more aggressive you buy Bitcoin, the more you empower everybody else that disagrees with you.

You see, like the harder I go, the more powerful everybody who took a different point of view becomes. And and so I refer to it, it's a perfect machine composed of imperfect components. And yeah, everybody, the world's full of people that hold Bitcoin or have Bitcoin in a country you don't like, in a method you don't like, doing things you don't like, but they're empowering you.

And the harder they go, the more they empower you. And so what happens is like what would happen if Berkshire Hathway decided they're going to buy a hundred billion dollars of Bitcoin tomorrow to all the rest of us, right? It's not hurting you.

It's helping you. What happens if they do the opposite? Right?

And so I think Bitcoin is a classic anti-fragile network and it's getting more stable. It's getting more uh conservative. It's getting more indestructible, more anti-fragile the more that it is embraced by any entity, whether you agree with their values or not.

They're all just strengthening the network against whoever is the next attacker. Amazing. All right.

Well, we are running out of time here, so we're going to wrap it up. Michael, thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you for your leadership.

Give Michael warm up. Thank you for your support.