How about crypto? Look at Bitcoin hitting an all-time high on continued enthusiasm over the new administration
policies. Here's what President-elect Trump told our Jim Kramer during his visit right here to the New York Stock Exchange just last week about crypto.
You're embracing crypto very different from the previous administration strategic petroleum reserve like for crypto
Yeah, I think so. We're gonna do something great with crypto because we don't want China or anybody else
Not just China, but others are embracing it and we want to be the head
One big beneficiary of the Bitcoin rally has been micro strategy the stock up more than 500% just this year
Micro strategy will now be added to the Nasdaq 100 on December 23rd in its annual rebalancing the company currently holds
439,000 Bitcoin after announcing another purchase just this morning joining us as micro strategy co-founder and executive chairman Michael sailor
Well, you're you're the guests of the moment. So is there a limit to how much Bitcoin you're going to acquire?
No, I've said we'll just keep buying the top forever
Every day is a good day to buy Bitcoin. We look at it as cyber Manhattan
I would have bought Manhattan a hundred years ago 200 years ago every year for the past 300 years
You pay a little bit more than the person that bought Manhattan before you but it's always a good investment to invest in
The economic capital of the free world
Do you think the Trump is serious about creating this Bitcoin reserve and how how would that work?
I think he is and
You know if you think about the Louisiana purchase
California and Alaska we paid 40 million dollars to buy 75% of the United States
Nobody remembers the 40 million dollars
But if you know where the money is going you should buy the property by the future and in this case
The Lumbus plan calls for a million Bitcoin acquisition
That's worth 16 trillion dollars to the country
RFK proposed four million Bitcoin that would be worth about 56 trillion dollars
There's room for Trump to go beyond that
even 81 trillion dollars in gains and that's against 36 trillion in the US national debt
So all the capital outside the US and all of the antiquated 20th century capital is going to flow
Into digital assets. It's going to flow into the Bitcoin network and the logical thing is for the US to buy it now and own the future and just chase it up at any price
I don't I think just a progressive acquisition of it makes sense
Keep in mind if you bought Manhattan from 1650 to 1700 a little bit every single year
It would have been a good acquisition right now we can buy the United States could literally buy
2025% of the Bitcoin network
Either by trading out its existing gold stores or just by just by borrowing a small trace amount of money
And so the Bitcoin network to go up by a factor of a hundred you might as well buy it before it hundred X's
Your your Manhattan analog is really interesting Michael because the reason it made would have made sense to buy Manhattan is because they agreed
It's going to be on a grid going north and I wonder if you see similar
Policy analogs right now in crypto. Are we that organized?
You know the world wants a digital assets framework and the United States has a great opportunity to define a digital assets framework
We need to define the definitions of a digital commodity a currency a security a token an NFT and an asset back token
And we need the rights and responsibilities of issuers and the exchanges and the owners
But that takes consensus from the executive branch the house the Senate and the industry and we didn't have that for the past four years
The opportunity for the US it's it's to issue ten trillion dollars of digital currency and back the dollar
It's to capture 50 trillion dollars of capital gain on the digital capital network
And I do believe with the digital assets framework that this administration could put forward
There's no reason why we won't see 500 trillion dollars of assets tokenized over the next 21 years and
280 trillion in capital flow into the digital capital network that is Bitcoin and where does that lead bitcoins eventual price
My 21 year forecast is for Bitcoin to appreciate about 29% a year a rr
To 13 million dollars of coin by the year 2045
I
Mean your strategy is really interesting because you're really the first company to adopt Bitcoin as your primary treasury reserve asset
Isn't that risky? Where does the risk lie besides just in the price falling?
Well four years ago the accounting was toxic. It was indefinite and intangible and it was unclear whether the SEC would embrace Bitcoin as a digital commodity
And it was unclear what the regulatory regime would be
That has that has been substantially de-risked in the year 2024
And so now you really have companies on the Bitcoin standard where they use a digital commodity like Bitcoin
Which is 60 a rr 60-vol or companies on the US dollar standard which is zero vol 0 a r
Micro strategies the largest hole the largest holder of digital assets in the world now
We've got 46 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin and and we're leveraging that
So what do you say to people who say well? It's just a it's a Ponzi scheme because every time Bitcoin goes up
You issue more equity and debt to buy more Bitcoin and just keeps going and going and going
Yeah, just like developers and Manhattan every time Manhattan real estate goes up in value
They issue more debt to develop more real estate. That's why your buildings are so tall in New York City
It's been going on for 350 years. I would call it an economy
Yeah, the other in here. It's not the only innovation going on right now my goal this announcement out of alphabet last week regarding quantum computing
Kind of refreshing to that debate about whether Bitcoin or crypto encryption can survive long-term advances in quantum. How can it?
There's nobody more sophisticated with regard to encryption than the Bitcoin community
Satoshi was writing about this 15 years ago
um
The quantum benchmark the Google ran has no practical use in the real world right now
It's an impressive benchmark
But in fact if anybody ever develops a super powerful computer that can crack encryption
It's going to be a challenge for Microsoft Google the US government
Every company on earth and of course the entire technology community is is going to be focused on that and when that happens
We'll all just upgrade our software with quantum resistant algorithms
Right now the consensus in the community is is we're nowhere close to that being a threat
What sort of other policies are you hoping to get from a Trump administration that is definitely more crypto and has put in place people that are friendlier
You know the great opportunity in the United States is to is to issue the world's reserve digital currency
There's about a hundred and fifty billion dollars of stablecoin currency and tether is the leader
But they can't locate in the United States because we don't have a sufficiently clear
regulatory framework for issuing digital currencies
If the US normalizes that there's no reason why US banks and US companies can't issue ten trillion dollars of digital currency
Backed by US dollar currency equivalents sitting in US banks that would be tremendously good for the United States
But they don't want to compete with the US dollar. I mean Trump has made it
He campaigned on it and has followed through with tariff threats that they want to keep the US dollar as the global reserve currency
so
They don't want to threaten that with Bitcoin
No, I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm saying that the US should allow US banks and US corporations to issue a token backed by the US dollar
That would be backed by trillions of dollars of US like a stable coin
Yeah, a stable coin tether circle their stable coins, but isn't that a big threat to the monetary system the Fed
Well, if we if we actually normalize that then there's going to be ten trillion dollars of demand for US
Treasuries. It's the best thing you could do for the dollar
What it means is that all eight billion people on the planet will be using the US dollar on their Android phones and their iPhones in order to
In order to trade with each other that would be great for American values and the American currency
Well, we kind of we already we have that with the US dollar. I do I do wonder
I mean people have brought up before if you so pro Bitcoin and crypto and even stable coin if that ultimately does represent a threat to the US dollar as the world
For currency sir
The point is people in Russia and China and Africa and South America can't trade with the US dollar directly because they don't have US dollar bank accounts
They're using tether and they're using tether because they desperately want access to the dollar on their mobile phone
And right now the US doesn't have regulatory clarity that allows a US corporation to issue a US dollar back stable coin
That works for the Chinese the Russians the Africans the Europeans and so if the US wants to be the world reserve digital currency
You don't want a hundred and fifty billion dollars issued by an offshore entity
What you want is ten trillion dollars of US dollar stable coin issued by US regulated banks and US regulated companies
With them with the money on shore in the United States back by US treasuries the demand is there
We just need a digital assets framework in order for that entire industry to come to life
Finally Michael. We've been mentioning your addition to the Nasdaq 100
I wonder what you think that says about the moment we're in
Well, it's an enormously legitimizing for Bitcoin is the asset class for the entire crypto industry and of course for micro strategy
Since we're the largest holder of digital assets in the world right now
A hundred's a magic number we've now got more than a hundred billion dollars of open interest in our options market
We've got more than a hundred billion dollar market cap
We've got more than a hundred percent volatility
We've been running a hundred percent AR for the past four years
And we're holding forty six billion dollars worth of Bitcoin right now that's up a hundred and fifty percent year to date
So I just think it's a it's a tremendous milestone for us
Well, I should someone buy micro strategy the stock instead of Bitcoin the asset to gain exposure
Micro strategies and operating company and because we have that forty six billion dollar Treasury
We can securitize Bitcoin using our treasury as collateral
The bond market wants us to strip the volatility and the performance and the uncertainty off the asset and give them a lower
yielding
More
more
predictable instrument and so we're the leader in that market
And when we do that we create high volatility high performance equity in the equity in the options market once that
So let me give you a little number here
Year-to-date we have issued securities both convertible bonds and equities at a premium to our underlies
assets that created a 72.4% BTC yield that translates to again of a hundred thirty six thousand nine hundred sixty five Bitcoin without
Delusion or cost at a hundred and five thousand of Bitcoin that's creating
14.38 billion dollars in shareholder value
So how would you value a company that generated 14.4 billion in earnings a year growing a hundred percent year over a year
And that's what the micro strategy treasury operation is doing
If you're a Bitcoin or you would love that
Yeah, I mean it's interesting to tie it to their to earnings for share there not just a leverage levered bet on Bitcoin itself
Michael
Thank you for joining us a big day for you as it has been nearly every day
This year we appreciate the time
Thanks for having me sir
Michael Taylor