Joining us now to discuss is MicroStrategy CEO, Michael Sailor.
Michael, great to have you back on.
And let's just get right to that news of the day.
Did you actually talk with Elon Musk offline and share your playbook
from, as you put it, one rocket scientist to another?
You know, there are business rules regarding how public company
officers are allowed to communicate to the public.
And so I'm constrained in what I can say, but you know,
what we said on Twitter.
And you know what I've been saying all along, which is it's a great idea.
All right, that's not a no.
It's not a yes either.
So between this move or I guess because of this move with Tesla today,
I imagine you're feeling pretty vindicated in your strategy and really what I think
the vote of confidence of Musk buying into Bitcoin kind of implies here.
I wonder though how you would respond to critics who would say that given the
volatility of Bitcoin, we just touched on that.
The risks associated with it with it as an asset class,
that you are not only putting the company at risk, but shareholders'
investments at risk. How would you respond?
Well, first of all, they were very measured in this.
They have plenty of access, liquidity in US dollars.
And so I don't think there's any criticism of what they've done.
Companies that are converting their dollars in the Bitcoin are taking a
non-performing asset and they're turning it into the best performing asset.
Bitcoin's been appreciating it, something like 230% year after year after year for a decade.
And so this is a this is part of the digital transformation that's taking an analog
monetary asset and converting it into a digital asset.
And ultimately over the long, and that's going to be good for the business.
Yeah, I mean, I get that Bitcoin has appreciated pretty dramatically,
especially in the last couple of months, but it has been extremely volatile as well.
So how do you how do you yourself think about that and how do you discuss that with other
companies that are potentially looking to get involved and convert their cash to Bitcoin?
Well, if you take the long view over the decade, you're going to have either a stable loss of 75%
of your shareholder value if you hold the money in cash.
Or you're going to have a volatile appreciation that may very well be doubling every six months.
And so I'd rather have a volatile appreciation at 200% a year than a stable depreciation at the
rate of 15 to 20% a year. This was interesting to me. This was in the Tesla filing today.
As intangible assets without centralized issuers or governing bodies, digital assets have been and
may in the future be subject to security breaches, cyber attacks or other malicious activities.
And it goes on from there. How are you keeping your Bitcoin safe?
Well, I think they're institutional grade costodians right now that have worked out those issues.
And corporations are doing all their purchasing and normally they're doing their
custodying with those institutional grade costodians. This, you know, the same way that you would
trust a custodian for other types of assets that you would hold on the balance sheet.
Currency or commodity. And I ask because as we see officials considering the possibility of
more regulation to the asset class, how it's defined is going to have implications.
BTCOIN is not a currency. It's digital gold. It's a store of value. And it's taking the place
of gold because people realize that you can move a block of Bitcoin a million times faster.
And you can program that Bitcoin on a computer to run a million times an hour. So it's the basis
of the 21st century cyber economy. It's not going to replace the dollar. It's not going to replace
the visa or the PayPal or the mastercard payment rails. It's simply a stable store of value to build
a financial framework upon. Yeah, I certainly get that. And I know you laid this out in that conference
last week as well with some of your conversations. The hedge against inflation depreciation of the
dollar. And the fact that Bitcoin has appreciated relative to that that fiat and others.
In recent times and what that means in terms of spending power and that store of value for companies
such as yours. I am curious whether and if you are having conversations with other CEOs
at other companies. I mean, RBC, today, just put out a note saying that Apple could be the next
likely contender to buy Bitcoin. I think, first of all, I was surprised we had more than 7,000
enterprises in attendance last week. And those discussions have gone viral on YouTube,
250,000 or more views of just those sessions in the past few days. I've spoken to lots and lots of
CEOs and I've spoken to lots of lots of other investors and enterprises. And I think the word
is spreading pretty rapidly. With Tesla's move, I think they de-risk this for corporate treasury.
I think you're going to see more CFOs, more treasurers look very hard at this and make decisions.
Yeah, and certainly one of those conversations last week was with Ross Stevens at Stone
Ridge about all the institutional money that's getting in as well. So I have a feeling we're
going to be talking about this. Even more in the weeks and months and years to come, Michael
Salar, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.