Michael Saylor: ‘I’d Rather Win in Volatile Fashion Than Lose Slowly, Sell Your Gold'

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all right let's get to our segment today

hi this is daniella cabone and welcome

back to the daniela cambodia show here

on stansberry research well the last

time i spoke with michael saylor it was

during our historic gold versus bitcoin

debate today marks his return to my show

michael always good to see you welcome

back

thank you danielle happy to be here

well a few things have changed since the

last time you were on you've since

stepped down as ceo of microstrategy and

bitcoin and crypto as a whole have had a

very tumultuous second quarter of the

year um just to recap for everyone in

may a popular stable coin failed leading

to plummeting crypto prices and the

bankruptcy of several crypto lenders and

investment firms bitcoins price uh in

june fell below 20 000. marking a loss

of more than 70 from its november highs

so we're going to be talking about all

this and more but first michael how are

you doing

i'm awesome i'm doing great life is good

good just motoring how long

all right so let's start

let's start with a bang here i want to

pull up a recent article from the wall

street journal with the headline michael

saylor bet billions on bitcoin and lost

is this a fair assessment what do you

make of this headline i mean they're

they're already waving the white flag

here for you

oh that's that's brutally unfair no um

the facts of the matter are uh

on august 10th

of 2020

we embarked on a bitcoin strategy

and when we did that the enterprise

value of our software business was about

66 dollars a share

and as i'm speaking with you right now

the stock is trading 329 dollars a share

our shareholders have made billions of

dollars since we started this strategy

no one's lost um if you actually look at

the performance of bitcoin since we

actually bought 250 million dollars of

it and embarked on a bitcoin strategy

bitcoin's up 101 percent

uh and uh that's the the s p is up 23

percent the nasdaq's are 15 gold is down

12 bonds are down 15 and silver is down

28

so in fact bitcoin smashed every single

asset

the only thing that outperformed bitcoin

in that time period is microstrategy

stock up 166

so we actually perform 1.6 x bitcoin

now if you look at what we could have

done

we could have competed with the

enterprise software companies in our

industry

the best performing enterprise software

company in that time period is oracle

oracle's up 39

microstrategy's up 166

ibm's up 2

sales force is down 4 percent sap is

down 40

we're definitely not losing

now if you want to compare us to the

best companies on earth

the strongest companies on earth that

are more powerful than governments

would be google apple and microsoft

those three big tech companies are up 58

46 percent and 34

respectively

amazon down 11

facebook down 35 netflix down 52

microstrategy up 167 percent and one

last factoid

out of the 500 s p companies

there are only 14 companies that

outperformed us in the time period we

outperformed 97

of the s p

and the ones that outperformed as you

could have guessed are like energy

companies and and they were selling oil

when oil hit zero dollars a barrel and

their stock smashed back

so

uh

we're totally fine

i'm fine

the company's strategy is working well

if you had said in the second quarter of

2020 i want you to come up with a

strategy for a low growth

mid-size software company to outperform

every asset class all big tech stocks

and every enterprise software company by

a factor of three to ten

right this is the only one that you

could have come up with and we actually

uh did it

i think what throws people off is that

the stock got volatile like the way

we've done it is with volatility the you

know the company stock traded a few

million dollars a day when we started

now it trades hundreds of millions of

dollars a day the open interest and the

options have exploded

the stock you know has exploded up

exploded down exploded up it moves all

around just like bitcoin which has gone

through almost three cycles

in the past two years so

i would say to summarize

you know conventional critics and

conventional mainstream analysts they

don't get the crypto economy they don't

understand bitcoin and they hate

volatility

and those are the people that would tell

you take all your money put it in a bank

account yielding one percent interest

and just don't lose it and don't bother

us

but when we embrace the bitcoin strategy

we did it because we knew that if we

held our cash in a bank account it was

going to lose 20 percent of its

purchasing power per year

and it has as predicted the money supply

expanded by 40 single-family homes in

the us have increased in price 40

if you had 500 million dollars it would

have brought you know bought you the 40

less today than it would have bought you

two years ago

so we had to do something for our

shareholders at the time

and that something was by high quality

digital property

and and our choice was we could suffer a

non-volatile slow death

or we could get on a bumpy lifeboat a

big a big

orange lifeboat the bitcoin lifeboat and

we're gonna get tossed around in the

ocean

but we're going to float and we're going

to appreciate over time

and uh

when i started buying this stuff uh

bitcoin was 9 000 10 000 a coin

and we've just been consistently

accumulating bitcoin

we have not sold any bitcoin

and if you if you're a short time

horizon person and you want to look at

making a trade in the past three months

or six months

just about every everything you could

have bought in the world in the past six

months is a losing trade if you have a

short enough time frame

but if you have a two-year time frame

bitcoin's winning it's winning over four

years it's winning over six years it's

winning over eight years and

i just like to be in business more than

two years from now so that's why we did

it

let's talk about the timing of

everything i mean why why now why did

you feel you had to step down now and

really just focus purely on bitcoin

because you know i follow you on twitter

every day it's still a mantra of love

for bitcoin you've never wavered away

from it your conviction has only grown

your faith has only grown how so why

yeah

you know we've been planning uh to do

this for four years so i i just think we

got caught up in uh in some very

colorful media i you may know uh most

people don't i'm the controlling

shareholder of microstrategy i've said

68 of the voting shares and i started

the company 33 years ago so i've been

the ceo for 33 years i'm the chairman of

the board i'm the controlling

shareholder

and

i've been talking about bitcoin for two

years

and about two years ago we promoted uh

a gentleman fongly to be the president

of the company and he was the president

and the cfo

so

he's been running

the day-to-day business hands-on as the

president for the past two years

and and 99 percent of the activity of

the business

is selling software so we have

2150 people we sell software we make

software we have thousands of customers

we do thousands of transactions a

quarter we hire hundreds of people a

year we train thousands of people a year

all of the activity is enterprise

software it turns out that once a

quarter we do a bitcoin transaction

and i talk about it a lot

so if you think about it you realize you

know it's very logical for the ceo of

the company to be the person that

actually manages the day-to-day business

because all the transaction and all of

the labor intensity is all about

software

i don't need to be

the ceo in order to oversee the bitcoin

side of the business because i can do

that as the chairman of the board and as

the chair of the investments committee

where we provide oversight for bitcoin

acquisition and maybe once a quarter we

might do a big deal like borrow 200

million or issue equity or something or

we might buy bitcoin but it really is

something that can be best supervised at

the board level

and um

the path for fong uh to be ceo has been

set in stone uh well it's been set for

years and years he was promoted to chief

operating officer in 2018

and

he's been the cfo of the company since

2015.

so after two years as president it made

sense he it's very clear to the

shareholders he was the heir apparent

and we hired a new cfo a full-time cfo

andrew kang

he joined in may

and so once andrew joined a cfo that

cleared the way for fong to become

president and ceo

i have been working with him hands-on to

transfer the entire business to him for

seven years

it turns out that in the last six weeks

bitcoin traded down and when bitcoin

traded down we ended up taking uh uh

indefinite intangible charge in our q2

results

that that by the way it's like a 900

million dollar charge it was very

colorful i think it was cited by some uh

critical journalist

but uh we'd already covered 700 million

or 750 million of that charge by the

time we even reported it

it's just that gaap accounting doesn't

let you write up your assets

so

if you're positive

if you're positive you say okay well

this is normal succession and

appropriate corporate governance if you

just want to write something troll-ish

you would uh pair the the non-cash right

off with me taking the executive

chairman role but

obviously it has nothing to do with that

it's always been the plan for me to be

executive chairman and for following to

be the ceo but so why not have waited

for better timing no

because we were waiting

for we don't run the company based upon

bitcoin volatility

and we don't run the company based upon

indefinite and ca intangible accounting

charges that would be putting the

interest of our shareholders after the

optics

of

of a random troll

we run the company based on what's best

for the shareholders and what's best for

the employees and what's best for the

customers

so the trigger for us to promote phong

was the arrival of andrew as the cfo

we because

fong was the president and cfo and you

can't have a public company where the

ceo is also the cfo it would be

inappropriate to do that like only in

the most dire of circumstances would you

ever do that so

when andrew arrived

we wanted fong to be ceo

and

the accounting charge is an intangible

non-cash charge it really again as i

said before bitcoin traded down to 17

600

we wrote our our uh assets down that

level you know bitcoin is trading at

23

900 right now we haven't written it up

but i mean

the shareholders understand this

you can see in their reaction to the

announcement i want to get back to a

point you made about the volatility and

that that's an important

one to bring up here

do you think this makes the case that

maybe bitcoin just is not for everyone

that you know we're not talking about

right now what we've seen a correction

of 10 20 i mean this is

extreme volatility is it just not for

everyone like maybe most folks just

can't stomach it

and can't risk that money

i think that uh

the way to think about investing in

bitcoin is you should only invest what

you're going to hold for four years or

longer and ideally it's generational

wealth transfer and then you should

dollar cost average into it and and for

the average person if they dollar cost

average into it is a strong long-term

store of value they'll be fine

uh

and and the metric you ought to stare at

is probably uh

rolling for

the the simple four-year moving average

right and and if you look at the simple

moving average over 458 days

it very rarely touches that point it

went slightly below it in the depths of

the crypto crisis and now it's trading

above it that number is 22

266.

so if you think of that and you say i

know i'm going to hold at least four

years then it isn't that anxiety

inducing

if you have a short time horizon like

you you want to make money in four weeks

or four months it's going to be much

more stressful because it is a volatile

asset

and it's the volatility impacts two

types of people

it impacts people that are short-term

investors that they want to make a quick

buck or they just never want to lose

money

and the volatility also impacts

public companies or companies that rely

heavily on gaap accounting because the

accounting the volatility is detrimental

to the accounting treatment because you

have to always write it down you can

never write it up

and so you end up with a circumstance

where you could be holding a billion

dollars and it looks like you have 200

million dollars and no one can tell the

difference unless they go to the trouble

to figure it out themselves and that's

very opaque

so i would say that people that really

are fixated upon gap optics

right they'll they'll be

a little bit uh troubled by it and then

people that have very short term time

horizons are troubled

but but um for the rest of the world

it's a pretty good idea it's the best

i've just pointed out to you we've

outperformed every asset every big tech

company every enterprise software

company 97 of all the companies using

this strategy so

if

the the volatility is the price you pay

for the performance and if you can't

stomach the heat

right you can't be in the kitchen so i

would rather win

in a volatile fashion

then lose

slowly

in a non-volatile way

i what i um

saw you last in april of this year i was

moderating a panel with you at the etf

conference and there was so much

enthusiasm at the time right uh i think

janet yellen had spoken that week saying

crypto was transformative biden had just

signed an executive order kind of green

lighting the crypto

space uh so there was a lot of

excitement walk me through where you

think things took a downturn i mean was

it

the inflationary scenario was it

incoming interest rates

what do you think was the catalyst

yeah i thought i mean if we're talking

about what's caused uh the crypto crash

i think that uh it was triggered first

by um

the interest rates right the tightening

of the fed and that put pressure on all

risk assets from the beginning of the

year

and i think the next catalyst with the

terra luna meltdown

because in essence they had 50 billion

dollars worth of

of luna and ust backed by a billion or

two billion dollars of real assets

so that was very unstable and that

algorithmic stable coin was just an

accident waiting to happen

it's not it's almost like they loaned

out they borrowed 20 billion dollars and

agreed to pay 20 interest on it and they

were going to issue equity to pay the

interest so they're going to issue luna

in order to pay 20 interest on ust

through that protocol and that was an

accident waiting to happen there's no

way that was sustainable

so that melted down a lot of the cryptos

and resulted in

in the unwinding

of the three arrows

voyager and celsius bets and

and uh and i think a lot of people took

a lot of inappropriate risk right

the cr the cryptos were on registered

securities but then loaning out hundreds

of millions of dollars without

collateral or under collateralized loans

amongst the crypto hedge funds

that created a margin call run and so

they ended up becoming forced sellers

and liquidating positions in a panic

and that uh that took us all the way to

30 000 and i think the celsius thing was

the straw that broke the camel's back

where celsius just completely unwound

and and you had a whole set of panicked

liquidations as

counterparties seized assets and seized

collateral and sold it at the market

so that's what takes the market down and

now the market i think has probably

bottomed and i i it looks like it's just

looking much better it's gone from 17

000 up to 24 000 now

but i make the other fundamental point

if you're a short-term trader this uh

this drives volatility and this is very

meaningful and if you had a weak balance

sheet this is devastating and if you

trusted any of the crypto wildcat banks

right it's tragic right anybody that put

their money in voyager or celsius or the

like or gave money to three arrows is

awful but

if you look at the fundamentals the

fundamentals are you have the head of

the sec endorsing bitcoin as a commodity

you have the head of the cftc

you know ready to endorse bitcoin as a

commodity you have multiple senators

endorsing bitcoin as commodity you've

already heard janet yellen endorse

bitcoin as commodity

we just saw today uh the head of the

central bank in brazil endorsing bitcoin

technology

and so

the fundamentals

are really good we just had larry fink

you know and blackrock in essence

endorsing bitcoin by saying that they're

going to sell their institutional

customers bitcoin on the blackrock

private wealth management system

so

what i see is bitcoin emerging as a

institutional

investment grade asset

being embraced by regulators

legislatures

and large-scale investors

and uh and the entire market's been very

educated by this crypto crash

now it's it's obvious to people the

difference between you know the good the

bad and the ugly right that the good

would be a stable coin backed by cash

equivalents that are transparently

published every week

like circle

right

the bad might be a a tether which it

works and they're competent but it's

opaque

and the ugly is you know is the ust that

just completely melts to zero

and uh you could likewise say bitcoin is

the good right it's a it's a digital

commodity decentralized with no issuer

you know without counterparty risk

non-sovereign store value

and then you've got all the other

creatures you know many of which are

unregistered securities and

and uh this has lit a fire under

legislators and regulators i think

they're going to accelerate

all their regulatory initiatives

and that is educating the market

and ultimately you have

you have hundreds of billions of dollars

that wants a long-term store of value

because currencies are crashing

everywhere in the world

and the thing that holds anybody back

from buying bitcoin is uncertainty about

its classification and the way it will

be treated by regulators

so as the regulation

gets clarified and as people get

illustrations of the difference between

bitcoin and luna

right used to be people aren't quite

sure about the difference well

and in fact a lot of people thought d5

is better you get a 20 yield on your

define bitcoin is dead money and now

they realize that you know there is a

counterparty risk to pursuing this

and this has educated the market you

know

very very effectively in a painful way

but in a rapid rate and i i think it

will catalyze the maturity of the asset

class and the institutionalization

of bitcoin uh to the benefit of the

bitcoin holders and the ecosystem

so you you beat me to the questions i

was going to ask does that fast-track

regulation but i guess the second part

of my question is and then are you

confident then what had to be flushed

out was flushed out or does more

cleansing need to happen in the space

i think a great deal of the bad behavior

has been flushed out i don't think you

can say everything i think i think

there's um

there's still a lot of um

unregistered securities in the crypto

ecosystem and it's undoubted that

bitcoin is

cross-collateralized against some of

those unregistered securities

and there's more regulation coming to

anyone that's in this space more clarity

so so i i think the worst of it is

behind us but i don't think that the

industry has has been clarified or

completely rationalized yet

i think that there's thousands and

thousands of cryptos that need to

disappear right i think there's a 99

rationalization rate that needs to

happen

and so i just think we went we went

through um and i'm pretty important

deleveraging

and i think the people will be much more

careful

in the way they view things going

forward

than they were

a couple years ago i think we were in a

wild west stage the first decade of the

industry and

i think we need to grow we need adult

supervision in the industry and

there's an entire generation of people

that need to understand counterparty

risk and basic risk management and they

also need to understand the difference

between a security and a commodity

and

with all you know due respect there's

still a lot of people that don't really

understand the the the ethical or legal

difference between a security and a

commodity and until they grasp the

nuance of how you create a digital

commodity

they're not going to grasp you know the

way to segment the market and the right

way to think about all these assets

on to that point um you

you

you came out saying that ethereum is

obviously a security taking a lot of

heat from the ethereum a community

including a vitalik himself

i guess my question is like why you know

you're going to get that from the

ethereum community right but do you feel

that

it's part of your mission to speak out

on the topic of ethereum

no people just want to ask me that

question

they're just trolling me i think

i i

i want to speak out about bitcoin right

the chair of the sec was asked probably

six times in congressional testimony and

other public appearances

whether bit whether ethereum was the

security or whether it was a commodity

and he wouldn't endorse it as a

commodity under testimony and in the

public eye so i i think it's above my

pay grade to opine and i know there is a

big debate there's going to be a debate

you know amongst regulators there's

going to be a debate in d.c

so they will work that out

i happen to be of the opinion it's an

investment contract i think it's quite

evident to anyone that spends a few

minutes thinking about it but

you know i'll leave it at that people

are free to make their own decisions i

want to bring up um

something that kevin o'leary brought up

on my show last week he said the real

gauge and this is speaking to bitcoin

specifically is where the institutional

buyer is he said it's right now it's

zero they have n no bitcoin absolutely

no bitcoin and anyone tells you the

sovereigns have it is full of quote poo

poo um

thoughts on this

where are where's the mindset of the

institutional buyer when it comes to

bitcoin

um i i think that um

bitcoin is

the only

asset in the space that is that is

broadly institutionally held

and it and it is more than zero for

example

we bought four billion dollars of it so

we know that companies have it we know

that institutional investors have it we

know they're insurance companies that

hold it so it's not zero but it is um

it is not nearly as broadly held as it

will be

and i i think that we're still early

days

i think that uh

it's uh the institution institutional

interest in bitcoin has dramatically

jumped in the macro community in the

hedge fund community over the past year

i think you can see in uh in the body

language and the rhetoric

of

jp morgan and goldman sachs you know

jamie dimon and the way that uh david

solomon speaks about us and the way the

black rock speaks about it and the way

that ray dalio speaks about it and the

way that george soros speaks about it

you can see that um we're no longer at

the stage where people are skeptical

that it will continue to exist or

skeptical of its value i think it's now

it's now got the grudging respect

of a lot of people

we're really more at the stage where um

we're waiting for regulatory clarity

there's just a lot of a lot of political

debates

you know at the dc level

uh over over how much friction will

will be in the space

i think the banks would like to see more

clarity from banking regulators about

how much they can hold on their balance

sheet and what the reserve ratio would

be and

i think the accounting treatment clearly

has been a has been a liability for

large institutions because indefinite

intangible is is

it's uh

always going to understate

the value and it's also going to create

it's always going to create confusion

because i could hold a billion and you

could hold 100 million and we would both

look like we held 100 million and you

would have to dig deep into my financial

statements to know the difference and so

it just makes everything hard and opaque

so

so i think that uh

that we have more adoption to come and

uh and

every single every single thing that

happens

every time that there's an advance from

the fdic or fasb or cftc or sec

or congress

i think all those things are you know

our catalyst for adoption

and uh and we're going to see more

institutional adoption as time goes on

i want to get to some questions i

tweeted that you'd be coming on the show

ask some folks to send in some questions

some people dm'd me some people sent

messages to my email box so if you don't

mind i'm gonna try i got tons but i'll

try and get through some here michael uh

of course this one speaks to my heart

here do you still believe gold is going

to zero and bitcoin is going to a

million

i i i think that bitcoin is a million

times better than gold and is going to

gradually demonetize gold over time so

now gold will go to the utility value of

gold you know whatever that utility

value is but uh

i don't think it's uh it's going to be

adopted as money in the 21st century

i think bitcoin is a better gold than

gold you can move it at the speed of

light you could see what the lightning

network evolving that pretty soon we'll

have a billion people able to able to

move any block of bitcoin anywhere

friction free

and so bitcoin is uh digital money for

the 21st century gold was metallic money

for the 19th century

so i just think if you believe in sound

money

then you should do yourself a service

and you ought to sell your gold and you

ought to buy bitcoin because bitcoin is

sound money for the 21st century and

gold was sound money for the 19th

century just that simple

okay going on here um

you suggested that tesla buying bitcoin

was the beginnings of corporate america

loading their balance sheets with

bitcoin what do you think now that tesla

has

sold they've still got some but what i

think is that uh the accounting is toxic

and uh fasbi

fasbi uh

didn't need to address this issue before

microstrategy tesla and and square all

bought bitcoin because there was no more

than a million dollars of bitcoin in an

operating company

so it was an immaterial issue now there

are billions and billions of dollars of

assets in in publicly traded companies

so it's material

lots and lots of people wrote to fasby

asking them to take this up as an issue

fasbi took a vote and unanimously agreed

to take this up as a project

and they're working on the project right

now so we will see uh what they come

back with but

for publicly traded companies with gap

accounting

uh

to adopt uh bitcoin in a big way there's

a couple things you need you either need

to fix the accounting so

so it's not prejudicial and hostile to

the ownership of the asset class and

that means at least make it kind of pair

a pursuit of to holding equity or

something like if you're holding equity

you take a mark to market you have fair

value accounting

so that's one possibility and the other

possibility is

people have to hold it in the form of a

security

and uh if you hold in security you would

probably get fair you would get fair

value accounting but that means an etf

and pro preferably a spot etf

so there isn't a spot etf right now

and even if you have a spot etf

the rules in public companies are you

can't hold more than 40 percent of your

assets as a security before you trip the

sec 40 act so

microstrategy couldn't do what we did if

we were holding bitcoin as a security we

have to hold it as a property

so i think that you'll see

large-scale treasury adoption

when you actually see

you know the accounting start to look

like fair value accounting

you know and or you start to see

a gateway like a spot etf and before if

you don't have either of those things

then it's then

you have to have the majority of your

enterprise value

be constituted a bitcoin

like with microstrategy we have 129

699 bitcoin so our shareholders can

multiply the price of bitcoin times that

and if bitcoin moves up a thousand

dollars they know we added 130 million

dollars worth of value so that's not

that hard

but if you were a company and five

percent of your enterprise value was

bitcoin or two percent or take tesla

they you know

they would have taken a massive

intangible write down and gotten all the

negative optics you know but uh it would

still be uh immaterial to the rest of

their p l or to the rest of their

enterprise value so it's like all the

downside not so much upside

whereas in our case our shareholders

will look at that and they can do their

own calculations so we don't necessarily

suffer from an indefinite intangible

non-cash charge so so i think that um

you will have to see some changes before

you see biggest incorporated option

there

you mentioned the spotty tf how far away

are we from from that becoming a reality

for you is it

really far away

i'm optimistic

okay i'm optimistic in the next 36

months we'll see improvements in both

the accounting and the spot etf and it

might come sooner might come on in a

year

i think

go ahead

uh this question came in via twitter

my question to sailors how can everyone

in the world become rich off bitcoin

there has never been a get rich scheme

the entire world is in on and everyone

makes out profitable and how is the

hedge versus inflation never valid when

it's lost 60 percent of its value during

these times

again you got to take a four year or

longer time horizon bitcoin is

outperforming everything in two four six

eight and ten years

so it's that simple

what you want to do is get rich slowly

not get rich quick

and that means that the time tested

technique for investment is you is you

buy high quality scarce desirable

property and you hold it forever

and you just got to figure out what is

scarce and desirable and high quality

going to throw in a lighter-hearted

question here um has michael ever

considered become a professor at his

alma mater mit for a full semester to

teach engineering or possibly a bitcoin

course thank you

you know um i uh i did a a little mini

course the sailor series with robert

breedlove which was like 20 hours or 20

22 hours of lectures

it's been seen by 250 000 people

so if you did the calculation

right it's like if i taught a thousand

students every year for 250 years

i did another four hour thing with uh

you know with lex friedman and and a

four-hour discussion in my

library in my house in miami

it's been seen by 3.9 million people

and i calculated that that's like more

communication than every meeting i had

in my entire life

so that so the the short answer is i

think i'll go on the podcast circuit i

do i do like teaching and i'm and i'm

very open to looking at you know more

academic things but i think the way to

do it in the 21st century

is with scalable

podcast mediums and streaming video and

and not the the 20th century way is

going to a classroom with a hundred

students at a time

think about you know 100 students at a

time

you know teach teach

two semesters and get to 200 students a

year and teach for 40 years

or 20 years and get to 4 000 students

and

you get to 4 000 people on your show

right in the first few minutes after you

upload it don't you

absolutely so we're all educators we

just got to educate

look danielle i don't hate on the gold

people i wish i wouldn't hate on me it's

not i don't get the idea the point i'm

trying to make is

you want to you want to give music to a

billion people give them free digital

music and if you want to give money to a

billion people give them digital money

and if you want to give education to a

billion people give them digital

education and i love the

the steinway piano and i love a bar of a

gold watch you know

and i love mit in the classroom

but you got to go forward you can't go

back if you want to make the world a

better place

all right

well on that point you know surprise

surprise in a turn of events frank just

also sent in a question

heard you were coming on the show he was

your opponent in the great historic

debate

um

do you concede michael that it perhaps

it was a bit irresponsible to advise

investors to sell everything mortgage

their homes and put it all in bitcoin

no first of all that's a trollish

comment if anybody looks at what i've

said consistently since september of

2020

what i've said is is

bitcoin is scarce desirable property and

i intend to hold it forever for the rest

of my life i'm not a speculator

and what i've also said is if you're in

a collapsing currency environment you

should have negative working capital

you're better off to have debt

than to have equity

and what's happened in the past two

years is

currencies have collapsed

you were better to have debt than equity

what i told people that i like mortgages

the mortgage rate was 2.7 percent

mortgage rates nearly doubled and if you

and if you had a chance to take a

mortgage at 2.8 percent and you waited

till the mortgage rates went to 5.2

percent

the cost of your home just went up by 80

percent so so paying off your home with

cash is probably not a good idea when

mortgage rates are cheap

holding cash that's losing 20 percent of

its value is not a good idea

that the blue dollar rate is 300 pesos

to the dollar i keep pointing this out

so

so i think what people uh

some people just want to find something

skeptical or critical to say but

but telling people that they ought to

buy

desirable things and take cheap money to

do it and hold it forever is simply the

way that you preserve generational

wealth and it's worked that way for a

long long time it still works that way

so yeah i don't apologize for saying i

like cheap mortgages and i don't

apologize for saying people should buy

bitcoin

everybody can decide how much bitcoin

they want to buy versus how much land

versus how much art versus how much

whatever else they want to own

the other thing that that frank doesn't

acknowledge again is two years ago

bitcoin was ten thousand dollars a coin

and since i started gold is down fifteen

percent and bitcoin is up a hundred

percent

so for everyone that has the time

horizon more than two years your choice

is lose 15 of your money or double your

money

and if you have a time horizon of less

than two years you can't reasonably

think of yourself as an investor you're

just a trader or a speculator

i mean i guess depends the the your

points we're working with i mean i

always say you can always adjust it to

make your case but

i'm still going to get you in front if

you if you always adjust it to be less

than two years or less than a year

then you're always a speculator right if

you're an investor you're taking a

four-year time horizon or a 10-year time

horizon or a 30-year time horizon

so it's much more

you know any advice you're giving to

someone for for two months is just

trading advice and i don't give anybody

you know since 1998 the gold market has

lapped the snp

so you know

everyone can make

make their case depending on the you

know the time horizon you're you're

looking at but

let's step outside of golden bitcoin for

a second

okay let's get out of this bubble for a

second because i just want to get your

general thoughts kathy wood coming out

saying we're you know we're definitely

in a recession i want to get michael

saylor's thoughts on the us economy how

you see things are we in a recession

we've been in a recession since march of

2020.

if you've if you calculated or if you

estimated the economy based upon real

output and then you adjusted it for the

strength of the currency

if the currency loses 20 of its

purchasing power and the economy is flat

then you contracted the economy by 20

percent so the currency's lost 40

percent of its purchasing power in the

past two years if the economy grew five

percent you're down 35 percent so yeah

we're in a recession but you know i'm

not a macro economist and i don't quit i

don't really care to engage in the

debate about what is the definition of a

recession or not

right it's about my pay grade

um just curious to get your thoughts on