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.