Michael Saylor on How Bitcoin Infiltrates Corporate America

michael

great to get you on real vision you've

become

suddenly a legend in the crypto business

and

kind of a real thought leader for many

people and i just thought it would be

fascinating to get you on but before we

go down that kind of crypto journey

i'd love to hear a bit about your

background where you came from

and also micro strategies itself okay

um i'm an air force brat my father was

in the military i lived on air force

bases my entire life

so i got a scholarship from the united

states air force to go to mit

i went to mit and i and i was that

generation where i read

science fiction books i read them all a

big fan of robert heinlein i

decided i was going to be a rocket

scientist and i got an aeronautics and

astronautics degree

with a specialty in spaceship design

and while i was there i um

i stumbled across this school of

management uh

system dynamics uh the construction of

cons uh computer models to predict the

future

and uh i ended up getting a second

degree in science

and technology and society in the

history of science

so that that was formative because it

was all about paradigm shifts the

structure of scientific revolutions

and how did people decide to embrace

nuclear power or electricity

or petroleum and a lot of people think

that technology just

kind of is a modern thing but of course

and they think that technology companies

are a class

of investments and i'm always amused

when finance people talk to me about the

tech sector because they're only

it's kind of an ignorant statement

there's never been a successful

growth company that wasn't a technology

company once you understand technology

for the past hundred years

john d rockefeller was a tech company

you know general electric was a tech

company

craft and hershey's were tech companies

so um studying technology for the past

hundred two

three four hundred years and why people

do it that was interesting to me

i am thought i was going to be a fighter

pilot astronaut

right but uh so i learned fly in the air

force and in my senior year

reagan won the cold war they ramped down

the military cut it in half and i had a

macroeconomic event

combined with just a random

a random personal event that catapulted

me into business

the macroeconomic event was the end of

the cold war the drawdown

of um the united states military

uh and uh the united states had paid for

my education and i was like on the hook

to serve i thought i'd be in the

military ten years

and um my final

flight physical my senior year at mit

they diagnosed me with a benign heart

murmur

and that disqualified me from flying

jets

now by the way the hilarious part of the

story is

they kicked me out of uh the aviation

program

uh i was a little bit dejected and then

the next week they came and they said

you can join the air force reserve and

be a civilian

and i was going to pay three times as

much money as a civilian as i would have

made in the air force

so i thought well you just gave me a

free education and i get to like

not pay the money back by the way the

week before they said well if you don't

go in the military that's awol you go to

jail

okay so i went from you're going to be

in the military for a decade or you go

to jail to

ronald reagan is giving you the gift of

your freedom and by the way to make it

easier

if you want to be in the military you

have to wait two years

working a part-time job before we call

you up and then maybe we'll call you up

so i kind of got a kick out of the

military and then a doctor said you

can't fly

and i was kind of dejected and i thought

well this must be a sign

sorry for interrupting your video but i

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i don't think it's something you could

afford to be without

so i kind of got a kick out of the

military and then a doctor said you

can't fly

and i was kind of dejected and i thought

well this must be a sign from god i

should do something else

so i joined the air force reserve and i

left mit

i am i worked for about two years

and i was gonna go get a phd uh because

i had a very simple list i have you know

every

every red-blooded american male in the

80s had this list

rock star astronaut

fighter pod astronaut top gun right

obviously yeah

professor okay or ceo

so i tried my rockstar thing in high

school and then i realized

rock stars don't make any money or at

least

percent of musicians make like 20 bucks

for the game

i tried and i just can't play guitar i'm

just not coordinated enough to have to

give up

for one reason the other we give up on

rockstar yeah that was our first

goal the second goal was fighter pilot

astronaut and that that was dashed by

some physician

you were close by the way the hilarious

part of the story is a decade

later i go back to the doctor he goes oh

you're perfectly fine i said i can't be

fine i have benign heart murmur i'm

mitral valve prolapse

he goes no you don't i said but but i'm

sure i do they kicked me out of the air

force because i had it

he said oh that was a mistake they used

to make that mistake all the time

you know we have much better equipment

now

so so i left my fighter pilot astronaut

track

because of a mistake and i ended up uh

ended up working but i left the military

track on

february march my senior year i missed

all of the financial aid applications

for fellowships i couldn't afford

i had no money i couldn't afford to go

to a phd program so i worked for a year

i applied for all the fellowships i got

into mit

and harvard and i was going to go get my

phd and be a professor and life was done

and uh just as i did that i informed my

boss and my boss worked at

the dupont corporation and he had i had

built a computer simulation

to predict the return on the investment

of about a billion dollars of capital

investment in titanium dioxide

and they needed that model to get the

board to give them the money

so when i tended my resignation

the guy saw his billion dollars of

capital going away

and i'm sure he said to someone that

works for him go tell

give the kid whatever he wants but he

can't quit yet

and i was 24 year old i happened to be

important to a guy that needed a billion

dollars

you know i didn't know i was important i

was just the right place at the right

time

so he tells a guy who tells a guy that

comes to me and says

okay well we'll give you a raise if you

stay i said i don't want to raise

i want to be a professor they said well

what do you want i said

i said rock star astronaut

there's only one other thing i want i

want my own company

so i said i'll stay if you finance my

i i want uh i got millions of dollars of

contracts

i got a quarter million dollars up front

i got free office space for a couple of

years

i got all the computer equipment i.t

support 10 people from dupont came over

to work for me

they didn't take any equity so it's the

best deal ever

and i you i did this one negotiation my

best negotiation my life

they you know i had zero money in fact

when i started this company

i went to a bank and i got the only

unsecured loan that you can get as a 23

year old

which is i said i want to buy five

thousand dollars of furniture

i mean they gave me a 5 000 furniture

loan

i was living in an apartment at 700

bucks a month with uh

with milk crates for bookshelves and i

thought

five grand that'll last me six months i

maybe that'll make it so i got a 5 000

furniture loan

then i said to dupont i need a hundred

thousand dollar cash check

up front to start you can imagine these

guys in suits and they thought the kid

is out of his mind

and and they said we can't give you that

you might take that money and run off to

the caribbean

like maybe where you are right now and i

was like well you know you got to give

me the money because i

and this is my negotiating story i said

you got to give me the money

because i have no money

[Laughter]

and they looked at me and i you got a

point there you got no money

so i they literally wrote me a hundred

thousand dollar check and by

rao at this point on seven hundred

dollar a month

rent i literally believe that hundred

thousand dollars would last me for seven

years

i calculated i had seven years of

capital took the money

and i started micro strategy and where

10 people the first year and i thought

i'm going to defer

my phd program and when this thing fails

i'm going back to college and the next

year we were 20 people the next year we

were 40 people the next year we were 80

people the next year we were 300 people

and the next year people said you got to

go public

and at some point what year are we in

what year are we in now

we started i graduated in mit 87

i started this in 89 started

microstrategy in 89

wow and i again i got so lucky like

lucky that i got misdiagnosed by that

doctor lucky that

reagan won the cold war then i got lucky

that the dot-com boom took off because

if you recall between 96 and 99

everybody was going public and we were

just coming of age in 96

97 you know and in 98 we came public

june of 98

and of course it would come if we are

two years late

wouldn't have happened two years early

wouldn't have happened we came out right

that through that window and by then it

was just too late for me to go back to

college and i was like stuck

as a ceo better worse

so that's how microstrategy was founded

it was if i could i couldn't do it again

like in that twilight zone episode where

the ceo goes back

and gets all of his knowledge to try

again he ends up the janitor

if you put me back there again

i'm like well i need the cold war to end

and i need a doctor to make a mistake

and i need someone to tell me to do the

opposite of what i wanted to do and then

you know it's just all random so were

you

a risk taker with the firm so as you go

through

the journey from you know going public

so everyone's a risk taker when you

start a business you have to be

but then after that were you a risk

taker i mean how did how did that

kind of corporate journey evolved you

were ceo

you know i in hindsight i was a risk

taker

but at the time i didn't realize i was

taking the risk

the most dangerous kind of risk i you

know

like uh like if i if i could go back i

would give myself

counsel to do things differently but

yeah we

we did take risk although i'm

one thing that i i did is i just was

always very passionate about

technology so we launched microstrategy

as a business intelligence company and

we were always inventing the next thing

finally the first um the first risk

that i took was i created a piece of

software

to create computer simulations on a

macintosh

and older wiser minds professors from

mit told me

uh that's how awful idea um the

macintosh is not gonna win

everybody knows that business people use

the pc okay we were like a million

dollar company then i said

well i guess you're right but the

macintosh is much more beautiful and

better technology than the pc

so we doubled and doubled again

and they and the professor that gave me

that advice was still running a 300 000

a year consulting business and we were 4

million

with with the wrong technology so then

the professor asked me what i was doing

i said well

i'm creating executive information

systems using this spreadsheet called

wings with a hyperscripting language and

that professor said

well all my friends tell me that excel

is going to be the choice for all big

businesses

and wings is going to fail so i said

well you may be right but excel doesn't

have a scripting language

so we'll try it for a while well we

doubled again and doubled again

we got to be 30 million and he was right

and he's still running his 350 000

consulting business and then he asked me

what i was doing and i said

well i've decided to convert to

microsoft visual basic and we're going

to create relational analytics on top of

big databases he said well do you have

an experienced big database i said

no none at all and he said well you know

visual basic is not what people use for

software engineering they use c

plus i said yeah but i can't figure that

out yet

so we did it and we doubled again to 60

million dollars and he was still running

his 350 million dollar

a 50 000 consulting business not making

a mistake

at which point i realized you know

you're kind of an idiot you need to

write us

the software in c plus plus so we took

the money that we made making the first

set of mistakes and we wrote it in c

plus plus and we doubled again

and then you know i'm sure someone said

don't go public

but basically i would say we mistake

we're not very good at listening to

people that's your problem

you know i always chase after these

shiny things

okay but but there's a method to the

madness which is you're better to be

correct and do something that works

now and then figure it out three or four

years from now

then to do nothing and sit and wait and

be beat to death

so i mean the short of the story is you

know i took like six or seven risk and

and every three years we had to invent

something new

web intelligence mobile intelligence

we launched uh we launched a business

called alarm.com

about i got really enamored with domain

names

i you know i bought microstrategy.com

for my email and then i got lazy and i

thought

i hate typing micro wouldn't it be

better if i just had the email

sailor at strategy.com so i bought it

you know back in the day when you could

buy it for a hundred thousand dollars i

bought the word

strategy and still own it so then i

thought this is kind of cool

what other words could i buy i thought

it'd be cool to be

sailor michael.com so i bought

michael.com

and then i bought mike.com and then i

was like then i bought wisdom

and by the way the world needs hope

right everybody needs hope

i own hope i own hope.com

so i bought all these domain names hope

i own allah if you would like hope by

the way every

about once every month someone wants to

buy hope for me

or they want some hope but they always

offer me like a hundred and two hundred

thousand dollars

and i'm hoping for a hundred million

dollars

so i just keep it but that's a

meandering way of saying

i got re-enamored with domains back in

the mid-90s to the late 90s

and then i started thinking these are

like real estate and cyberspace

what if we could commercialize them so i

commercialized

strategy.com and i created this like uh

it was like a twitter subscription

you could sign up for alerts to anything

under the sun

and the company went from zero to 100

million in one year

and then went from 100 million to zero

in one year

and i you know it was it was

it was interesting i learned a lot from

that i had the skin flayed off my

back but you know then

but then i went on to alarm.com

and but we launched these under the

microstrategy umbrella

and the idea behind alarm was what if

you could wire all your home alarm

systems into the internet and they would

talk to you and talk to your phone and

they would tell they would call you and

tell you if someone broke into your

house

and then and uh you know not a brilliant

idea

today amazon and google and apple are

doing it

pretty unique in the year 1998 or 1999

wow so we launched that and

we launched it on alarm.com so if you go

and type alarm.com right now what you'll

find is

it's a billion dollar company uh we

eventually spun it off we made a decent

amount of money off it then they

went public with goldman sachs and it's

it's a billion dollar nasdaq traded

company now

so that's one of my babies uh it flew

away from home

i created another one called i bought

angel raw

angel a-n-g-e-f my theory of these was

very simple which is

people have a hard time spelling and

they have a hard time remembering things

so everybody gets taught how to spell

angel or hope when they're in

high school or junior high so if i tell

you

my charity or my company or whatever is

on angel you go

am a-n-g-e-o you don't got to go to the

google you don't have to go to yahoo you

don't have to search for it

if you search by the way for voice

on google you get a billion hits you

have to sift through a billion

if your name of your company is

something voice or whatever voice of the

people there's a billion things you're

fighting with

if you own voice.com you go to the top

by the way not only do you go to the top

of the search engine

right nobody needs the search engine you

can bypass a search engine everybody

knows how to type in

voice right so the idea was own the word

in cyberspace it's a scarce asset right

it's

fascinating and for 10 you know 1 000

years people been using the word

so own the word so we basically

commercialized on angel the idea of

interactive voice response like emma

i'm sorry not like uh siri siri or

or or the like or alexa and uh we did it

back in

2000 anybody could basically build an

interactive

voice response application we plugged it

into your telephone

and that started to work and about it

was a sas application we ran it out of

the cloud and you plugged in your

telephone

and we built it to a certain point but

it was a totally different brand it was

a different business model and

and i had an enterprise software company

and this was not enterprise software and

it drove

all of the accountants crazy so

eventually we realized it was more

valuable to someone else than it was to

us and we sold it for about 120 million

dollars

uh and so that was my next little hit

with a domain

and then then at some point i started to

realize

that if you're not the best in the world

at something

nobody wants you for anything okay and

it's like

you know in the early days we all

thought well

i got 30 million dollars i can build

this app everybody wanted to be what's

up everybody wanted to be instagram or

whatever

i when i'm i gotta but if i had a nickel

for every time someone said i have an

idea for a mobile app you know

it's like yeah you do right and

it's worth a nickel i launched all these

things some work

some didn't work right and i you know i

i tried

i tried it many of them and then i

eventually realized that you need to

focus right it's the first

hurdle is is can you acquire a thing can

you build something

okay you generally can i mean

can you buy that thing the second hurdle

is

can you um can you compete in that

market right can you can you maintain a

competitiveness

in that market that means investing

every year as much as the next best

person is investing forever

right can you stay competitive that's a

higher hurdle

but the highest hurdle is can you

commercialize or not can you profit from

the thing

so a lot of people can do a thing yeah

most people can't do a thing better

consistently forever

and even if you can can you make money

off it

okay so this is a this is an

articulation of stoicism

just because you can do a thing doesn't

mean you should do a thing

and every young man he sees everything

he's like i have to do all this stuff

i have an idea for this and this and

this and this and this

so i i went through that journey of do

this and i kind of worked for you

you have more successes than failures i

failed up

i got a lot of scars but i but it was

humbling

to i mean you have to have the failures

uh along with the successes because if

you if you don't fail eventually you get

this big failure where it all comes

crashing down

so i guess i adopted along the way this

idea of stoicism and i realized that

you need to put all of your heart and

soul into one thing

and so at that point we sold off the one

company we

spun off the other thing and i realized

you know my destiny was i could i could

run

microstrategy and be the world's best

business intelligence company solely

focused upon that one thing that's what

we're going to be

and um i went back to doing that and i

let the other things go

and i let the domain portfolio just sit

and um it and and we just we're the

little engine that could focus upon

making our business intelligence better

with web intelligence and mobile

intelligence and cloud intelligence and

and now our cool thing is hyper

intelligence it's like

it's like know the answer before you ask

the question without clicking on

anything

you know and i tell you about that in a

bit if you want but yeah i'm super

interested

i i was just busy minding my own

business

i got off i used to tweet you know i

used to tweet all the time i got off

twitter

i focused on my core business and then

eventually i came back i discovered

bitcoin

the day i put on twitter that we bought

250 million

worth of bitcoin the entire hive mind of

crypto twitter came to life

and they went through every tweet that i

had put out there

a thousand of them and then someone

dredges up the tweet where i had

once upon a time in my imminent

brilliance discovered that

bitcoin was dead and it was going to

zero and i

enthusiastically posted that back in

2013.

and and everybody wanted to know what i

thought about that and

and and what i got to tell you is

i didn't remember i ever had an opinion

on bitcoin

until they reminded me that i had once

been utterly wrong

on it and so i i guess that's very

humbling

but uh but i i love the entire crypto

twitter community i mean i think they're

the smartest

coolest most interesting uh charismatic

individuals

you know when they're right there right

when they're wrong they're still

kind of interestingly right and uh and

i think they make us better versions of

ourself but

putting that aside i was minding my own

business running micro strategy

trying to be the best business

intelligence company we can and i would

say that's 150

focus on the p l and i was not you know

and and with regard to investment my

investment world consisted of

this row it's like i was a technology

investor

in the year 2012 i published a book the

mobile wave

and in the mobile wave ion essence said

software is leaping

from out from under your desk beyond

your laptop

onto a mobile device it's going from

solid state

to liquid state to vapor state and it's

going to be like vapor all around us

and what that means is that the entire

software

world is becoming networked

networked uh networked vapor state

uh incredibly powerful dematerialized

versions of of

products and services and so the summary

is

is um apple computers going to rule the

world

buy apple facebook amazon google go

if you read the book you know that's

what i wrote i mean the epiphany was

2009 i asked my niece who was nine years

old

you know what do you want for christmas

and she said i want the big apple and i

said you want a trip to new york city

and she goes no i want an ipad okay and

i thought

apple's going to replace new york city i

was going to rule the world

so my investment thesis was quite simple

you know

apple facebook amazon google a simple

way

for a tech investor to think is you buy

a dominant

network according to metcalf's law

that's won the market

the mobile network the information

network the video network the social

network

i just named apple google youtube

facebook the you know commercial very

simple

buy the dominant network and wait while

all the naysayers on wall street

and all the talking heads and all the

people that know better

tell you why you you know hedge

i hate the word hedge like like

like uh you know i can tell you wall

street

luminaries in 2012 would lecture me on

they would say you know you shouldn't

buy too much apple stock

we've got a we've got a mutual fund and

what we do is if your apple stock gets

to be too much of your

computer portfolio we sell it and buy hp

and ibm to diversify you

you know and i said well guys don't you

realize that eventually apple's going to

eat them all

and there won't be a need for hp or ibm

or anybody and what happens when apple

is 150

of all the profit in the entire tech

industry industry right

well we don't see it that way okay

that's what they thought

and then they go well you know we're

gonna protect you

if uh if your share of your portfolio is

too much technology

we're gonna sell technology and we're

gonna buy all these other assets

and i was like but guys what happens

when technology eats everything and

there aren't any other assets

okay in my opinion and i'm gonna be

snarky here

i think an ignorant investor thinks that

technology companies are a part of

of the index or they're a part of the

industry

in my opinion as a science historian

john d rockefeller was running a

technology company if you study the

history of standard oil

he did everything that jeff bezos did a

hundred years earlier

and if you study general electric once

upon a time electricity was pretty

technically interesting and if you've

actually been to the hershey's factory

in pennsylvania

not a one of these investors could build

the damn thing hershey's factory

is a computer built in steel welded

which is the most

majestic majestic creation of mankind

you could possibly imagine

imagine writing a computer program and

billions of dollars of steel and moving

parts that spits out

a hundred thousand candy bars an hour

you know without contaminating them you

know

it's you think it's not technology or

or craft you know i create ketchup

the technology was i had clean room

technology

i had to take the tomatoes manufacture

the ketchup

put in a seal container without any

bacteria in it so that it didn't rot

over the course of the next year okay

it's

clean room technology no different than

intel semiconductor chips

so when these people think oh well we're

not

buying a technology company it's like

every company that ever succeeded was a

technology company and the only reason

it grew

was it had technology superior to

everybody else

so i i happen to you know back to 2012 i

thought

my investment thesis is you buy

technology companies that have a

dominant

place in their industry that are going

to eat everything and then you just wait

while all the people that don't really

think hard about this

short you or diversify out of you and

eventually

some 80 year old investor that's got

more money than god

will discover that apple computer is not

some newfangled you know uh gimmick

right eventually and he will buy it at

10x what you bought it for

and and but and then it will double

again right and he will make some money

and you will have made some money but

you'll have to be beat to death by

well well-educated well-intentioned

diversifying experts

while you wait for that to happen and

they're going to say things like

we're going to hedge you out of this or

we don't want to

don't want to take too much risk on

apple don't want to take too much risk

on google

what if you had diversified your google

search engine into every other search

engine for the last

20 years you know one of the things i've

talked about many times is

there's a lot of people who want to

trade they think trading makes money

when you look at people who built real

wealth it's basically one bet

you know bill gates is who he is because

he didn't sell his stock

essentially you know and that's the same

people take one

clear bet filter out all of the noise

and just pursue it

we're all you know i listened to to uh

your phrase irresponsibly long

right but but you know it's really

tongue-in-cheek

you're not irresponsibly

long you're you're just

you're just uh unfortunately

rational like maybe the word is

is uh is like uh

maybe uh some slightly early being

rational

like you're making a rational decision

uh no

i'm on what's the word for unpopular

you're rational and

unpopular exclu exclusively

rational maybe that's the word

exclusively rational

so once you understand what's going to

happen

you kind of got to do it i i bought a

lot of bitcoin

recently like over the past before that

why the hell did you have so much cash

you know that was the question i was

thinking okay great you bought bitcoin

how come you had so much cash aren't you

supposed to make cash if you're in

business you're supposed to make money

but what do you do with it it's just

sitting in the business

okay well this takes me back uh back to

where

we went off on my little tangent which

is

i was minding my own business running

microstrategy

where you know running the p l i was a

wage earner you know you go and you make

a salary and you spend less money than

you make it's like

it's a 20th century idea my dad taught

me that

like depression error economics spend

less than you make

so we're making money spending less than

we're making putting cash in the bank

and we're struggling to compete against

you know

my competitors are ibm oracle sap

you know microsoft they're all 100 times

bigger than us

we're the independent we're the you know

the switzerland so we're doing that that

kind of takes up a lot of your attention

and i'm not really paying attention to

macroeconomics

i don't you know my my investment thesis

as i said was

buy tech stocks but like you can't buy

tech stocks as a public company ceo

and put the treasury into tech stocks

and you certainly couldn't do it near

2012

you might do in your personal portfolio

but but the

the conventional wisdom if you're

running a corporate treasury is

you're going to buy you're going to put

cash and you're going to buy short-term

treasuries short-term t-bills and

i happen to believe before the financial

crisis

you know i remember the time when you

can make five and a half percent

interest on overnight money we're

getting five

five and a half percent yield you have

500 million dollars you're getting paid

30 million dollars

finally i happen to remember when

savings accounts paid six percent

interest

it's like and by the way we didn't think

we were getting a good deal from the

bank we thought that was totally

reasonable

and every conventional wisdom was

the risk-free cost of capital

is six to eight percent and then you get

attack on a risk premium of four percent

so your real cost to capital is 12 to do

anything and that's the old day

so that that's the way i thought about

the treasury

and then i thought and then there were

other people what else can i do with the

money

you can buy your own stock back or you

can buy another company

now i teach a course in uh management

theory to all

my managers and my number one question

is

how do you wreck a software company in

my history and by

rao i'm like the longest presiding

public company ceo in the enterprise

software industry

nobody has been ceo of a public

enterprise software company longer than

me 22

years 88 quarters i count them

one at a time everybody came and gone

okay how do you wreck a software company

you know you have an answer for me what

do you think

number one way to wreck it i'm assuming

it's going to be acquire somebody else

make a acquisition make a bad

acquisition okay bingo

the ceo of sap comes in he lasts for

nine months he buys autonomy

they take an 11 billion dollar write-off

it's pretty impressive to burn 11

billion dollars

in 11 months on one transaction that you

probably spend

i don't know a few hours on i mean

like how many lifetimes how many

a million lifetimes to make 11 billion

dollars

so um the number one way to kill a

company is make a bad acquisition

so i got all this cash do i go buy

something i i have lived long enough to

see

90 percent yeah how about microsoft

buying nokia that was a good idea

right uh by the way you could have seen

that one coming a mile away that was the

most awful idea

you could imagine uh you want to count

the number

90 of all acquisitions end awfully

right and and there's a few accretive

ones

if you buy a small company pump it

through a massive distribution channel

jack it up by a factor of 10 with no

variable cost

you know maybe it works but acquisitions

are bad so

i'm not going to buy a company so what

else do you do with the cash

you buy your own stock back okay how

many

how many companies have gone toys r us

gone bankrupt

because they bought that you know they

lever up they issue a massive dividend

they drain the capital right drain all

the capital out of the company they're

running on

um what happened if you were actually

running

on uh on vapor when covid hit

yeah it's all over everybody is

insolvent

they're all out of business overnight

okay so that's another way to kill the

company you drain all your capital

so so what's left

what what the heck is left okay steve

jobs is my hero

steve jobs had a near a near-death

experience with this company apple

computer was almost you know

there was a point when michael dell told

apple they should just give the money

back to the shareholders and shut down

right that's a tweet you probably don't

like coming back

okay so steve jobs kept all that cash

you know until the day he died and they

accumulate they didn't buy back the

stock

i would you know i thought maybe i would

like microstrategy to not

die and so i was going to keep the

capital and

by the way so i can serve the customers

yeah you have nightmares of your cfo the

nightmare is

you let a customer down right like some

when someone actually invests 10 million

dollars in my company

software and then they build something

with it and they deploy it

you know like you're going to go tell

them oh we decided not to update the

software

let me put it differently how would you

feel if you put 100 million dollars into

bitcoin

and then the miner said we're turning

off the rigs and the developers said

we're not going to patch the bug or

upgrade and so it's just going to stop

working right so you have a you have an

ethical moral obligation to your

customers and a lot of times these ceos

they kind of they kind of get cute

this is the problem with the the lbo

guys

we're going to get cute we're going to

buy it i'm going to buy marvel comics

i'm going to leverage it up drain the

capital out of it and bankrupt marvel

right happened right sad

happen right so don't want to do that

so what can i do i just leave the cash

in the bank and i'm buying the stock

back at some rate and then along comes

covid and and covet is this

transformational experience

thomas kuhn and the structure of

scientific revolutions which is the

seminal work on the history of science

he wrote when the paradigm shift comes

along

write the old guard you know when we

invent uh

antibiotics or or the science of

sterilization or

or nuclear energy or whatever it is we

invent

the old guard rejects it no one accepts

it until they're dead