Billionaire Michael Saylor Believes in Bitcoin More Than Ever

When it comes to publicly traded

companies that own Bitcoin, one

firm totally dominates.

And it's not Tesla or Square

or Coinbase.

It's MicroStrategy, a publicly

traded company based in Virginia

that provides business,

intelligence, mobile software and

cloud computing.

It owns about two and a half times

as much Bitcoin as the next

closest company.

The reason MicroStrategy is so long

on Bitcoin is because its 57

year old billionaire CEO

Michael Saylor had an epiphany

during the summer of 2020 when

COVID 19 shut down most

of the country.

Bitcoin is an approximation

of a perfect monetary system because

it is correct.

It has no inflation and it

is not corruptible because as

decentralized.

As the economy tanked

due to external factors, Saylor

directed MicroStrategy to keep

buying Bitcoin regardless

of the price. And he's remained

bullish despite the recent steep

price slide.

While joking on Twitter that his

next job just might be working at

a McDonald's.

Bitcoin, he believes is the last,

best hope of creating an economy

that is independent of the

machinations of politicians,

central bankers and connected

investors who rig the system

to benefit themselves at the

expense of regular people.

Reason sat down with Saylor at the

Bitcoin conference in Miami this

April to talk about why he's all

in on Bitcoin, how his training

as an engineer informs his worldview

and his belief that the one thing

holding back the mass adoption

of a non-state backed currency

is a lack of clarity in how

the U.S. government will regulate

it.

Michael Saylor, thanks for talking

to Reason.

Happy to be here.

Let's start with a

kind of general statement you

have written in various places.

Bitcoin is hope.

What do you mean by that?

I think if you don't have property

rights,

then your life is hopeless.

So anybody in the world

without the ability to store

economic energy in the form of

property or in the form

of a proper money,

can't plan for the future.

I liken it to being a type one

diabetic where you can't form

fat.

So if you can't actually

store energy for

the future, then by definition

your life is hopeless, can't plan

anything and advance your living

day by day, hand to

mouth.

And on the day

that you fail to hunt

or you fail to catch something, you

go hungry. And after a few weeks of

it, you starve to death.

Is there?

But there's a lot of hope before

Bitcoin, right?

You know, and whatever else we might

say about the dollar or fiat

currency, you know, people have been

doing a pretty good job over the

past 250 years here of

living for the future and having

hope. Right.

I think if you look at the history

of the world, you can see a lot of

desperation and desolation.

Right. So the plight maybe

the maybe the Romans, the rich

Romans did okay if they didn't kill

each other, the goal is didn't do

okay.

Right. The Roman Empire had like a

million Roman citizens and

190 million serfs

and billions and billions of

people have lived without hope

for quite a while.

I don't think the human condition

has been great.

I think that the best money that we

had for 10,000 years was gold.

But we know that gold is imperfect

money and we can trace thousands and

thousands of wars to it,

and we can trace tens of

thousands of stories of people that

saved their money in gold to have it

seized or lost.

If you go back to before Bitcoin,

parts of the world had

had assets that they could

use to store economic value,

maybe the United States and

Europe.

But there are parts of the world

like South America and Africa

that not in thousands

of years have actually had

proper property rights

or proper monetary assets.

So their life has been hopeless.

Yeah.

And continues.

They continue to struggle.

Right. There are like what, like ten

currency collapses and

you know, in Argentina over the

course of 200 years.

Or the Russian currency collapse in

1998.

Mm hmm.

Right. So I think if

we look at the history

of of modern

currencies, right.

The US dollar is the winner in every

war in the 20th century and

it's lost 99.7%

of its value in 90 years and is

on track to lose 99.9%

of its value on 100 years.

That's the best one.

Right. So every other one

was worse than 99.9%.

Can you explain what it means

for the United States dollar to

lose 99% of its value?

Because there's no question that

people living, you know, in 1915

or 1970 or whatever,

the year the.

It was created versus now people

are living better.

So explain

what it means for the dollar to lose

value. And yet standards of

living continue to increase.