In this compelling conversation, Bitcoin advocate Pierre Rochard sits down with MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor to explore the revolutionary concept of Bitcoin as "digital energy" and its transformative potential for the global financial system. Saylor articulates his vision of Bitcoin as the next great technological paradigm shift - comparable to humanity's mastery of fire, electricity, and oil - that promises to digitally transform capital markets, credit systems, and corporate treasuries worldwide. From discussing the explosive growth of Bitcoin treasury companies across different nations to addressing critics and skeptics within both traditional finance and the Bitcoin community itself, this wide-ranging interview delves into the mechanics of digital credit creation, the future of tokenization, and why Saylor believes we're witnessing the birth of a multi-trillion dollar digital economy that will make the current financial system look antiquated. As Bitcoin approaches new all-time highs and institutional adoption accelerates, Saylor's bold predictions about $21 million Bitcoin and the emergence of hundreds of Bitcoin treasury companies offer a glimpse into what he sees as an inevitable digital financial revolution.

Guest: Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of MicroStrategy

Host: George Mekhail, Managing Director of Bitcoin for Corporates

Podcast: Bitcoin For Corporations

Episode: Michael Saylor: The Bitcoin Treasury Endgame - An Exclusive At-Home Interview

When: September 30, 2025

0:00 - Bitcoin as Digital Energy and the Evolution of Technology

Pierre Rochard: What's going on with Bitcoin is Bitcoin is evolving faster than society can digest it. After 30, 40, 50 years, you look back and you say, well, of course, we should have embraced the fire, the electricity, the wheel, the crude oil, the nuclear. I would say 95% of the decision makers in the finance world still don't really embrace or understand the idea of digital energy. I think when the administration says they want to be a global Bitcoin superpower, they mean they want the finance companies in the United States to lead the way. For every company in the world in any capital market, they're always better off to buy Bitcoin as their capital asset. Well, I think the endgame is we accumulate a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin and then we grow that capital by issuing more credit.

Well, we are here with Michael Saylor. Thanks so much for having us in your home. I'm really excited for this conversation. You've said that Bitcoin is hope. You own hope.com. You've made that a resource hub for Bitcoin education. Can you cast the vision of what hope? What is the hopeful part of Bitcoin? What's the world you want to live in? What kind of things change for the average person in a Bitcoin standard?

Michael Saylor: Well, if we look at the history of humanity, what has improved the human condition is technology. And the most formative technology that everybody's familiar with is fire. And fire once upon a time was hope. If you didn't have fire, you're going to freeze to death or starve to death. And then over time, other important technologies evolved. After fire, we mastered metals. And there was the bronze age, the Iron Age, the steel age. The wheel was a pretty important technology - no wheel, no cars.

Rockefeller commercialized chemical energy in the form of oil and standardized oil and called this company Standard Oil. And the real significance of oil was the humans got a tenth of a horsepower. And now the little dinky engine on the back of your small trolley boat is 70 horsepower, which is 700 human beings. And a typical tender could have 1,000 horsepower. And so think about 10,000 people rowing as hard as they can behind a 30-foot boat. And that's what we got when we got oil and when we got internal combustion engines. And so the hope for humanity has always been technology in a new sphere of influence whether it's automobiles or airplanes or electricity or oil or fire.

Bitcoin is hope because Bitcoin represents digital energy. It represents energy in cyberspace. It represents digital property, digital capital, digital gold. But in its most profound setting, it means digital energy. A way to convey energy through time, through space that is life affirming for 8 billion people, for 400 million corporations, for millions and millions of institutions, for hundreds of countries, for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of municipalities. And if I were to say fire is hope and you were shivering and freezing to death, you would get it. And if I were to say electricity is hope and you were in New York City trapped on the 98th floor of a skyscraper or trying to get up to the 98th floor of a skyscraper, you would get it. And now when I say Bitcoin is hope, I mean Bitcoin is digital energy. And if you want to send energy at the speed of light from here to halfway around the earth to save the life or solve the problem of another human being or corporation, you're going to need digital energy. And so it represents the next paradigm shift, the next manifestation in the story of energy and the story of human beings harnessing energy in order to improve the quality of their lives.

4:39 - Signs of Bitcoin Integration and Adoption

Pierre Rochard: And so as that transition sort of takes place and we move to a Bitcoin standard or some people say hyper Bitcoinization what sort of signs are you looking for? What signs to watch that indicate like this actually is happening?

Michael Saylor: Well I think we're really talking about the integration of digital energy into the civilization. So what do you want to see? Well, let's start with the basic application of digital energy as capital, digital capital. There's a trend right now for publicly traded companies to recapitalize on Bitcoin. Our company was the first in 2020, then there were two or three, and then there were 10, and then there were 20, then there were 40. And about a year ago there were 60 and then about 3 months ago there were 120 and right now there's more than 180. And I would expect that one way you know that the world is adopting Bitcoin as we go from 100 to a thousand to 10,000 to a 100,000. As some people have said, one day every company will be a Bitcoin treasury company. So recapitalizing companies on Bitcoin is one measure of adoption.

I think another measure of adoption is building support for Bitcoin into software applications. So right now you have applications that run on iPhones or Android phones like Cash App that have Bitcoin in them. You have wallets that support Bitcoin, but I look forward to the day when Apple builds it into the iPhone, when Google builds it into the Android operating system, when Microsoft builds it into the Microsoft operating systems, and it's either integral to the operating system of every consumer device or it's integral to the hardware itself. And people start to integrate Bitcoin support into all the hardware devices that propagate throughout the world and I think that'll be another really big sign.

7:04 - Leadership in the Bitcoin Treasury Movement

Pierre Rochard: So yeah, you mentioned five years in now. Five years ago you kind of came onto the scene, no one really knew who you were in Bitcoin. As you mentioned you're kind of the leader of these Bitcoin treasury companies. We talk to a lot of these executives who are launching a bitcoin strategy there's now 14 different countries represented and a lot of times what I hear is this so and so wants to be the Saylor of this country. How do you see yourself I guess in the space do you consider yourself a leader of this movement so to speak?

Michael Saylor: I feel like we have a responsibility to set a good example and to support and nurture everybody else in the marketplace. So we've tried new things, we've experimented and I think we go out of our way to share our learnings. We've sponsored a Bitcoin for corporations conference ever since we got in the space. And we published our playbook. We've open sourced what we're doing. We publish securities filings explaining exactly what we do, what we've learned. I think it's incumbent upon us to point out what we think works, what doesn't work. There are a lot of ways to approach this.

And I think the inspirational part of this movement is that unlike a lot of other industries where there can be a winner and everybody else is a loser - Walmart wins, most retailers lose, Amazon wins and 20,000 retailers lose. Apple wins and 20,000 device manufacturers lose. There's a lot of that. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, everybody can win because we're all aligned with the common value system and the base asset that we're using is Bitcoin and there's only going to be 21 million or less. And the network is the Bitcoin network. And so the growth and the success of a Bitcoin treasury company or even just a company that is holding Bitcoin in its treasury, any of those corporations adopting Bitcoin to any degree is beneficial to Bitcoin, to the entire network, and to every other company in the movement. So I think it's been very gratifying to see the growth of the industry.

We do our part. I think there are a lot of great contributions made by other companies and every day I read about another company trying a different strategy and I think we're all learning together and when companies try something and it works well I think you'll see adoption and when companies try things and they're suboptimal then we'll know not to do that thing and so it's definitely a team effort.

10:04 - Addressing Critics and Misconceptions

Pierre Rochard: I want to talk a little bit about some of the FUD or the critics. There's some skeptics out there, or some might call them haters of strategy and kind of the work that you do. Is there a critique or a misunderstanding of your work that kind of stands out?

Michael Saylor: I think when an airfoil moves faster than the speed of sound, like an airplane goes faster than the speed of sound, it creates a shock wave and a sonic boom. And it's very loud, it's very noisy, it's very turbulent. What's going on when you're going faster than the speed of sound is you're going faster than the rate at which air can communicate to the air in front of it, right? The molecules in front of your fuselage are not able to communicate to the molecules 100 meters in front of you. So, you end up with this sonic boom and massive turbulence and massive noise and chaos.

What's going on with Bitcoin is Bitcoin is evolving faster than society can digest it. And so I think you could say this is all consistent. Bitcoin was misunderstood in the year 2011. It was misunderstood by me in the year 2013. It was misunderstood again in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021. When we first got into the space in 2020, there were people that misunderstood it and we had a massive amount of criticism. When our stock was $10 a share when our stock went to $100 a share, it was massive amount of criticism again. When it crashed to $20 a share, there was still massive criticism. When we had $2 billion of Bitcoin, people were cackling saying, "Oh, you lost a billion dollars on this." When we made a hundred billion, everybody disappeared and slunk into the shadows and then a new set of trolls, a new set of critics came out when our market cap went above a hundred billion.

It's a different set of cynics, a different set of critics, a different set of misconceptions. I think you're going to see the ebb and flow of that set of misconceptions and that anxiety. It'll continue when Bitcoin is $100,000. It'll continue when Bitcoin is a million. It'll continue when Bitcoin is 10 million. It'll continue when Bitcoin goes to 20 million. And there's always going to be a new amount of a new narrative of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It'll be a different generation.

The people that used to laugh and say, "Oh, yeah, you lost a billion dollars trading in Bitcoin." They're gone. They disappeared, right? There'll be a new generation of people that say, "Do you think it makes sense to buy Bitcoin at a million dollars a coin? It's going to trade down to 500,000." Right? And then there'll be a set of people that will say, "You're buying it at 10 million a coin. It's going to trade to four six million. You lost so much money." This is how societies deal with new ideas. If you study paradigm shifts how long did it take to embrace electricity? How long did it people thought John D. Rockefeller was crazy for 30 years until he was the richest man in the world.

And then at the point that he was the richest man in the world, people thought, well, that trade is done. And that was just when they invented the automobile and he got 10 times richer, right? And so the society doesn't really deal with paradigm shifts that well and near-term. But after 30, 40, 50 years, you look back and you say, well, of course, we should have embraced the fire, the electricity, the wheel, the crude oil, the nuclear. Even nuclear power right now, for example, nuclear power has only become cool or useful in the last two years.

For 50 years, people thought nuclear power was an awful thing. And all of a sudden they wake up and they realize that I guess we need nuclear energy to power the AI data centers to make us super intelligent and if we don't turn it on we're going to be slow and stupid. So if it took them 50 years by the way nuclear power is like unlimited clean free energy and they had to fight for 60 years to get people to embrace the idea of unlimited clean energy. It doesn't surprise me that they'll be skeptics about digital energy. They won't get it. Max Planck said, science advances one funeral at a time.

And what he meant was the old guard, they will never ever accept the new idea. Whatever it is, they'll die. They will not accept the new idea. The only way you get people to accept a new idea is you wait for a new generation of decision makers and the old guard retires and they age out or you need a war, and people that don't believe in aircraft, but to start believing in aircraft when the aircraft flies over their city and drops a bomb on their head. And people that don't believe in atomic energy start believing in atomic energy if someone sets off a nuclear warhead in the middle of a war. And so I think that disruptive profound events like a near-death experience like during COVID I think that introduces new ideas and new paradigms. That's how we got introduced into this space. It was the war on currency and the war on COVID in 2020 that caused us to open our eyes and embrace the new idea.

The great I would say 95% of the decision makers in the finance world still don't really embrace or understand the idea of digital energy, digital capital, digital money. And I don't think it's a bad thing because the only way you're going to make 10 to 100x your money is if you pick the right thing and everybody disagrees with you. If everybody agrees with you and you do the right thing, well, everybody agreed you should buy Amazon in the year 2020 during the lockdowns because it was quite obvious that you needed Amazon during the lockdowns. It's the worst investment of the past 5 years because everybody agreed that it was a good investment and there's a lesson in that.

16:44 - Skepticism Within the Bitcoin Community

Pierre Rochard: Be interesting to see if there's a tipping point where everyone starts to come around kind of like what you're saying. Sounds like you've seen that too where skeptics maybe started five years ago now they're kind of proving them wrong. And a lot of the kind of what you're speaking to is the old guard the banking industry. What about skepticism within the Bitcoin community specifically? Does any of that surprise you or stand out in particular?

Michael Saylor: It's a vocal community. There are a lot of opinions. People say Bitcoin is money for enemies. There's been skepticism in the Bitcoin community since before Bitcoin, right? One could argue that Bitcoin was born out of skepticism, right? And so it's deep in the ethos and the culture the idea to question everything, slay your heroes, don't trust, verify, right? So the whole idea of Bitcoin is don't trust anybody don't trust any institution and so if you start asking the question how do you create an economic protocol where you don't want to trust any of 8 billion people and any of 400 million companies and any government? That's an interesting question.

I would say that skepticism has its place. It is motivational, but at some point it can become counterproductive. Maybe counterproductive idealism, right? And the truth of the matter is you do need to trust the company to create the airplane you fly in. You do need to trust the company that creates the car you drive in. You do need to trust the dentist at some point because you can't and you do need to trust the doctor because you can't take your own appendix out or at least it's very rare, right? And so at some point you do have to trust something and I would say the more evolved way to look at Bitcoin is not that you want to embrace it and never trust anything. The real inspiration and the promise of Bitcoin is once you've embraced it, you have the option to extend and withdraw your trust from time to time.

And if you choose to not trust the government, you can relocate your Bitcoin to a different country. And if you choose to trust a custodian, you can locate your Bitcoin with them. And when you decide to stop trusting them, you can relocate your Bitcoin to any of a hundred thousand other entities or if you go through a period of life when you choose not to trust anyone, you can self custody. And when you decide you don't trust yourself, you can transfer your custody to another family member, right? And change.

So the real power of Bitcoin is optionality and the reason we have the optionality is because the entire movement was born out of distrust. And so there is a yin and the yang. There is a dialectic here. And you need a healthy degree of skepticism and distrust and cynicism. But once you've created the technology, you're not going to reach your full potential unless you work with other human beings, right? And so ultimately, when you decide that you're going to work with other human beings either as a trusted custodian or a trusted hardware device manufacturer or trusted hardware wallet or you work with another corporation. And it's a trusted team of people whether they work on your teeth or work on your heart or manufacture the food or provide you with the aircraft, travel you need. At that point, you can reach your full potential and you do it empowered with property rights and with economic rights. And the reason that you will be able to trust them is because you have the option to withdraw your trust. Right. So I look at it as the great deterrent.

21:14 - The Gold Standard Comparison and Bitcoin's Advantages

Michael Saylor: If you think about gold and why gold failed, one reason gold failed is it's so incredibly difficult to custody. And so if you look at in the history of gold in the 20s, you had four great central bankers and the central banker in Germany was Schacht and a central banker in the US with Ben Strong. And the world was substantially on a gold standard. And the Germans had gold and the French had gold and the British had gold. The Americans had gold, but for the most part, the gold was either in London or in New York. The French gold was with the British or the Americans or the German gold was with the Americans. So there's a famous story where Schacht traveled to New York City, met with the head of the Fed, Ben Strong, and Ben Strong wanted to show him the German gold, took him down into the basement of the New York Fed, and they couldn't find the gold. And of course, the message of the story is this.

Gold is so difficult to custody. Countries couldn't figure out how to custody their own gold, much less the 100,000 companies in Germany or the 60 million people in Germany. And so the reason gold failed was it was too slow and too difficult to custody and therefore your property rights were always going to be impaired by a central actor. And imagine the entire world running on gold-based credit on a gold standard when all the gold in the world was sitting in London and New York City and most of it was in New York City and we can say oh yeah that's a bearer asset but not really because 40 million companies couldn't bear it 400 million people couldn't bear it right and So, Bitcoin it represents the bearer instrument, but it really is practical for an individual to take custody and it's practical for a company to take custody.

And of course, I guess what I counsel to people that are idealists is they don't trust banks and they don't trust companies. But the point that I would make is during the entire gold era, gold was so difficult to handle that no company could custody their gold and no bank could. If we lived in a world where 40,000 banks were custodians of Bitcoin, you would have evolved from a world where there were like eight or six custodians of gold in the entire world, right? And so I think that Bitcoin offers a promise of economic integrity and I don't think we should rail against a bank embracing Bitcoin.

The truth of the matter is if every country on earth embraced Bitcoin and the countries became the custodians of Bitcoin and the only thing we accomplished was to have 150 countries custody Bitcoin. That would be more decentralized than the gold standard. For hundreds of years, right? That would be an order of magnitude more decentralized than we had under the gold standard. What we're talking about is a world where if only banks and only governments custody Bitcoin, you would be a 100x to a thousand x more decentralized. And if corporations custody Bitcoin, you would be 10,000 times more decentralized. And of course in a world where millions of individuals or tens or hundreds of millions of individuals self custody, you're not like one, two, three, four orders of magnitude more decentralized. You're like six, seven, eight more orders of magnitude more decentralized.

So I tend to focus upon the fact that the worst case for the Senate is a million times better than the best case we had a 100 years ago or even the best case we had ever, right? in terms of decentralized monetary integrity.

25:31 - US Government Strategy and Bitcoin Superpower Goals

Pierre Rochard: Like that. I mean, staying on kind of a similar topic, the US recently acquired 10% of Intel. There was, of course, a strong response from the community as usual. Do you see any parallels between sort of this equity strategy and the current administration's stated goal of being a global Bitcoin superpower?

Michael Saylor: No, not totally unrelated. I think when the administration says they want to be a global Bitcoin superpower, they mean they want to encourage banks to bank Bitcoin, they want our banking system to embrace it, to extend loans against it, to offer yield or credit against it. They want to enable transactions. They want Apple and Google and Meta and Microsoft to support Bitcoin. They want public companies to be able to buy Bitcoin. They want an explosion and expansion of institutional grade Bitcoin custodians. They want favorable tax laws for Bitcoin, favorable security laws for Bitcoin. And they want the finance companies in the United States to lead the way in digital assets and digital capital and Bitcoin adoption.

27:11 - Addressing Humanitarian Concerns About Corporate Bitcoin Holdings

Pierre Rochard: Makes sense. One of the criticisms is through a humanitarian lens, if corporations hold a large share of the Bitcoin, what does that mean for the average person? How do you avoid crowding out small users?

Michael Saylor: Well, when we got involved, Bitcoin was trading $9,000 a coin, and today Bitcoin's $115,000 a coin. And it got that way because our company bought 3%. And BlackRock enabled institutions to buy like 4%. And that means that 93% of the gain and that's 93% of nearly $2 trillion. So $1.8 trillion went to the individuals that owned the Bitcoin before the corporations got involved. So the individuals not been crowded out. The individual just if you posit that individuals were the ones that owned the Bitcoin in the year 2020, then those individuals made $1.8 trillion since the corporations got involved. So the corporations aren't crowding out the individuals. The corporations are making the individuals that believed in Bitcoin insanely wealthy. And now the individuals can decide what do they want to do with that economic power, right?

And as a practical matter, it seems to me that for our company, if we were to ever get to 5% of the network, the network's going to be at least a million dollars a coin. If we were to go beyond it, it's going to 10 million a coin. So when we get to 7% of the network, if we do and Bitcoin is $10 million a coin and BlackRock keeps up with us, that means 85% of the network, right? And you're going to be talking about $200 trillion. So you're going to have $170 trillion that will flow to the individuals. So they're not exactly getting crowded out, right?

If anything, what you've got is the corporations are all engines turning the flywheel of the Bitcoin economy. Every single company, every Bitcoin treasury company that capitalizes on Bitcoin is like attaching a motor to the network. And every time that company buys $50 million worth of Bitcoin, they spin that drive shaft one turn. That's one day's natural supply, right? And so the more companies that come on, whether it's BlackRock or whether it's Strategy or whether it's MetaPlanet or whether it's 21 or whether it's BSTR or similar, each one of them is firing up a motor. All of the motors are powering up the network. If you're an individual and you believe in Bitcoin, you buy the Bitcoin, you cold storage the Bitcoin, and you let all the companies power up the network. If the companies didn't show up and the network was all individuals, Bitcoin would be trading $5,000 a coin.

And here's the problem. It wouldn't just trade at $5,000 a coin, but the corporations, if they were to choose a different network to power up, if all the companies went to Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or Ethereum or something else, Bitcoin would max out at 5,000 a coin and it would dwindle down to nothing because the companies would latch on to the next network and then they would go to every government in China and Russia and Europe and South America and Africa and the US and all the laws would be modified to benefit the other network and eventually squeeze the Bitcoin network out. So this is a protocol and you could even say there's a protocol war and it's a war to determine the future of money and the future of the war for the future of money is going to be fought and won with money.

So in this particular case it's the people that have the money are the institutional investors and the people that can organize the money are the corporations and if you want to win the monetary war you need the institutions that control all the capital and you need the corporations to get involved because you need the support of the government. The government can with a stroke of a pen, right, block 99% of all the capital from flowing into a network or they can enable it. And so I think the corporations are very important actors in this, right? They're the ones that are going to hire the lobbyists. They're the ones going to do the marketing. They're the ones that are going to defend the network and the individual, right, from having their Bitcoin seized, from having their Bitcoin shut down or from having a 95% tax on the Bitcoin, right? The reason that'll happen is because the corporations are a line of defense.

And when I think about Bitcoin, I think the miners are the first line of technical defense. They're defending the network with energy and power. And the Bitcoin treasury companies are the first line of economic defense. They're defending the network with capital, right? And even the Bitcoin exchanges, right, are the first line of defense technically. They're the ones that are going to implement the iPhone apps, the Android apps, right, the websites. And you really want very healthy exchanges, healthy treasuries, healthy miners. You want them to get big. You want them to be well capitalized. You want them everywhere in the world, right? The Bitcoin treasury company in Shanghai will lobby for the interest of Bitcoin with the Chinese government, right? You have to speak Chinese. You're going to have to be in Beijing if you're going to fight for Bitcoin. And it won't be the individual. It'll be the corporation and the better capitalized the more effective they'll be.

So I don't think there's any conflict of interest. It's not a zero sum game. If the world is going to embrace Bitcoin fully, that means corporations, banks, exchanges, operating companies, cities, states, federal governments, you want them all to embrace Bitcoin. You don't want to leave anybody out, right?

And the last observation I'll make is Bitcoin is like speaking English. And if you spoke English and you're an individual and you found out that the most powerful person in the world also spoke English, would you be offended? And if you found out that the people that run the bank that have all the money in the world in it also spoke English and offered websites in English, and if Apple and Google and Meta also offered software that ran in English, would you think, "Wow, they took my language. I want them to give it back. I don't if your dentist speaks English and the doctor speaks English and the cab driver speaks English and the pilot speaks English is that bad for you?

I don't think so. I think ultimately you want all of the rich, powerful, influential people, even the ones you disagree with, you want them all to speak your language. You want them to adopt your protocol. But if they're doing something that's bad for you, you want to see it coming and understand that they did it. Right. And so Bitcoin is a protocol. Ultimately, you want everybody to use the protocol. The world's going to be a better place and you're going to be better for their embrace of the protocol.

35:44 - Bitcoin Treasury Companies: Competition and Strategy

Pierre Rochard: I think that's really well said and helpful. Thanks for indulging the questions about FUD. Let's pivot a little bit to talk about the Bitcoin Treasury companies, this wave of them adopting Bitcoin. We talked a little bit about competition and how it's not a zero-sum game. Still we're seeing there there tends to be some regional kind of disputes and wanting to kind of be the first mover the competition for capital. What would you say to companies who are kind of in that space where what would be your encouragement in terms of competition?

Michael Saylor: Let's start with the basis the fundamental premise of the industry. Bitcoin is the monetary base of the crypto economy. It is the monetary crypto network. It is digital gold. If you go back 3,000 years, go back and read the Persian expedition by Xenophon. It's about 600 BC and Xenophon's writing about a bunch of Athenians and Spartans that are mercenaries and they go into Asia Minor and then they charge all the way through Babylon to Persia and they're fighting for Cyrus against his brother and Cyrus gets killed, and they have to make their way back to Greece. They have to cross 800 miles of hostile territory and they fight their way back through a hundred tribes. All the tribes speak a different language. They all have a different culture. They all want to kill each other. The Athenians don't trust the Spartans. The Spartans don't trust the Athenians. No one trusts the Persians, right? It's nonstop bloodshed and war. And this is before the Lydian coins. This is before we have coinage.

Now, here's the thing that's interesting about the story. The one thing they agree on is they all want to kill each other for gold. They all want gold. Now why do they want gold? Somehow 600 BC everybody agreed that gold was valuable and gold was money even though they could not agree on their gods, their cultures. They couldn't agree on anything else. But what's fascinating is the book takes it for granted that gold is money. Gold has been valued by thousands and thousands of different cultures, all killing each other, speaking different languages, worshiping different gods, but they're all fighting over gold. And so gold emerged as the primary monetary metal, not silver, not bronze, gold.

For 300 years, if you look at the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century, even into most of the 20th century, the world revolved around gold-backed credit. We issued bonds backed by gold. The British bonds, sovereign debt in Britain in 1770 was a gold back bond. In the Rothschild's times, they had gold back bonds, right? The French bonds were gold-backed, the German bonds, the Austrian bonds, the Spanish bonds gold-backed. All of the credit instruments were to a certain degree backed by gold and they would go off the gold standard and back on the gold standard. But this idea of gold-backed credit goes from the 1700s to the 1800s to the 1900s all the way through 1971.

And so we have hundreds and hundreds of years of gold-backed credit instruments. Then we have to wait and Satoshi invents Bitcoin and we fight over what is it and no one can decide. And now in the year 2025 we have consensus that Bitcoin is digital gold. So on CNBC talking heads agree on it. Everyone in the crypto economy agrees Bitcoin is the monetary foundation. It's digital gold. What are the other cryptos? Maybe they're digital silver. Maybe they're digital copper. Maybe they're digital palladium or digital platinum or digital silicon.

But the history of Western civilization isn't based on copper bonds, right? And there was experiment with silver, but silver bonds didn't really fly. It was primarily we settled upon one metallic monetary network and now we're settling on one crypto monetary network. So what is a Bitcoin treasury company? Well, there are two profound paradigm shifts. One, Bitcoin, digital capital, right? Digital gold never existed before. You could argue that it's only been nine months since the entire world agreed that Bitcoin was digital gold. That means you can now issue digital backed digital gold back credit or digital credit. If Bitcoin is digital gold is digital capital and that means that any credit instrument backed by Bitcoin becomes digital credit.

What we're talking about, if you look at it myopically, you're just thinking, well, how are these companies helping Bitcoin? If you look at it more granularly, the real point is how are these companies transforming the equity market and the credit market. If I create a company that buys Bitcoin and I accumulate a billion dollars of Bitcoin, I have a billion dollars of digital capital. What can I do with it? I can issue digital credit. Now, I want you to think about this for a bit. If I had a billion dollars of gold, I'm a gold bank, a goldsmith. I have a billion dollars of gold. I issue a $100 million of gold back credit, gold notes. And then they thought, well, why not 500 million? And then they thought, why not a billion dollars of gold notes? And where the story goes next? They're like, well, why not $2 billion of gold notes? Why not 10 billion? Pretty soon you had $5 of gold back credit for $1 of gold.

And the entire modern banking system grew out of that issuance of credit and the credit started from gold. And what was the strongest credit? One for one backed, right? One for one backed would be the strongest credit. So that means a billion dollars of Bitcoin could in theory be used to issue a billion dollars of Bitcoin backed credit. That would be one for one backed.

Now what's that displacing? It's displacing mortgage credit. Credit based upon retail houses, residential houses, commercial credit. That's credit based on commercial real estate. A building that's half empty, right? Or it's displacing corporate credit, credit based upon the cash flows of a company or it's displacing fiat credit, credit that's based on the promise of a government to print more credit, right? That is the status quo. And how big is that? Hundreds of trillions of dollars of those 20th century credit instruments.

And when you understand Bitcoin treasury company, the very compelling business model is I accumulate a bunch of Bitcoin capital through equity, then I begin to issue credit instruments against it. And those could be bond-like instruments, they could be convertible bond instruments, they could be preferred instruments, they could be convertible preferred instruments, they could be variable floating preferred. So there are all sorts of types of credit that can be issued against the underlying digital gold.

When you issue that credit, you create leverage on the capital. And when you create leverage on the capital, the equity of the company issuing the credit becomes digital equity. And that equity can outperform the Bitcoin. So, if I want to create a company that's going to perform 2x Bitcoin, I take the Bitcoin, I issue Bitcoin back credit against the Bitcoin. I issue digital credit backed by digital capital. I create digital equity and the digital equity outperforms the underlying capital asset.

Now, that's a profound idea. Who are those companies competing against? Not really each other. What they're competing against is the existing credit instruments in the capital market where they're going to issue credit or the existing equity instruments in the capital market where they're issuing equity. They're all just using Bitcoin as that leverage or as that base, that monetary base in order to create better equity and better credit.

45:13 - Regional Bitcoin Treasury Companies and Market Opportunities

Michael Saylor: So that being the case, you're going to see an explosion of these companies. And if they understand what I just said, then it stands to reason, let's take Brazil. I create a company, OBTC or Orange Bitcoin in Brazil. They're creating the first pure digital equity in the Brazilian market and their base is Bitcoin and asset going up 55% a year in dollars and they'll be competing against other equities in Brazil that aren't going up 55% a year in dollars. Right? Think about a company with a 55% growth rate being launched in Brazil. Is the equity valuable? Sure it is. Who are they competing against? Every company in Brazil, right? And then when they issue credit instruments, they'll be competing against every credit instrument in Brazil.

When you go to Japan, MetaPlanet is issuing digital equity in Japan. Who they compete against? Every Japanese company. Bitcoin's growing 55% a year. What's the growth rate of the average Japanese equity? One-twentieth that. Then when they start issuing credit, meta yield, they'll be issuing credit against Japanese credit instruments, the Japanese risk-free rate or the corporate bond rate for yield in Japan is like 50 basis points. If you offer 500 basis points, you are 10 times better than the thing they're issuing.

So there's place for monsters, for mega companies, right? MetaPlanet won't just be the most valuable hotel company in the world. They may be the most valuable company in old Japan, right? They can create and by the way, they're small compared to us, but the point is they're not competing against us. They're competing against Japanese equity and Japanese credit in the JPY currency. And that's a distinct capital market. That's why it makes sense to launch a Bitcoin company in Sweden, in Norway, in the Netherlands, in France, in the UK, in Brazil, in Japan, in Canada, and the US.

47:38 - The Scale of Digital Credit Transformation

Michael Saylor: Now, having said all that, all those capital markets that are waiting for a mega champion and the mega ones, the ones that are pure digital credit issuers, they could be a 100x. They could be ones you can take a $10 million or a $1 million company to a billion to 10 billion to a hundred billion. And if it's a big capital market like the UK or Germany or Japan, you can go to a trillion, right?

That doesn't mean there can't be 10 other companies in Japan that also follow MetaPlanet and they all 10x because let's take the US. We've issued digital credit instruments in the US. We've issued $10-12 billion of convertible bonds. We have about 8 billion outstanding now. We've issued $6 billion or so of preferred credit. You know what is that compared to the US credit market? The US dollar credit market is 100 trillion. So one trillion is 1%, 100 billion is 1%. So what is 10 billion? It's like a basis point.

So what we're doing is we're not competing against the other Bitcoin treasury companies. We are evangelizing and advocating digital credit and our move is to digitally transform the credit markets. And if we are 1% successful, we sell a trillion dollars of digital credit. Just 1% successful.

So what would help us? What would help us is a dozen other companies in the United States also marketing and evangelizing and educating the investors on digital credit, right? We have a hundred million retail investors. How many investors have dollars and want 10% yield instead of 3% yield from their bank? It's a lot, right? How many of the hundred million people that would prefer a bank account that yields 10% to a bank account that yields 3%. How many of them know about STRC? I mean, a lot of people in the Bitcoin community don't even know about STRC, right?

So, I give you a bank account backed by Bitcoin that gives you 10%. Well, what would help us? A hundred other companies copying that. You're like, well, won't that get crowded? Well, I'm describing kind of a better bank, right? Instead of going to a traditional fiat bank and getting 2% or 3% on your bank account, you go to a Bitcoin treasury company and you get 10%. A better bank. Well, how many banks were there in 1920? 25,000. How many banks are there today? 5,000. So there could be 5,000 Bitcoin treasury companies in the US.

Would it hurt us? No. Would it hurt them? Not really. Not until 50% of all the credit in the world has been digitally transformed to Bitcoin back credit. When there's a hundred trillion dollars of Bitcoin back credit, the Bitcoin ecosystem is hundreds of trillions. There's hundreds or thousands of companies. Who lost? And I'll give you the answer, by the way. Who's going to lose? Outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem, 20th century credit issuers, right? People issuing junk credit, under-collateralized, illiquid, low-yielding garbage, right?

They're going to find their credit lines will dry up because why would you invest in illiquid garbage that's not collateralized that gives you 4%. When you can invest in liquid credit that pays double or triple that's 10x collateralized, right? So weak antiquated credit issuers will get squeezed out. You can't even name them, right? It's like 4,000 weak regional banks that are selling preferred shares. You don't even know who they are. You can't even name them. They're trading over the counter. The 20th century over-the-counter market and the weak credit issuers, they will see credit lines dry up. They will get squeezed not overnight but over the course of a decade or two decades.

52:27 - Risk Management for Bitcoin Treasury Companies

Michael Saylor: Within the Bitcoin ecosystem, it's pretty hard to hurt yourself but if you find a way to get super leveraged on short-term extremely expensive margin debt, how do you hurt yourself in the Bitcoin ecosystem? I guess you take out a five to one levered loan from a crypto exchange. So it's not 100% levered. It's 500% levered and you post your collateral. If you can find a way to do a margin loan super levered then maybe you hurt yourself. But I don't think public companies will be able to do that. I don't think the market will offer publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies that kind of leverage.

So, I think if you stick to convertible bonds with longer duration or if you go to preferred stocks or even if you went to junk bonds, as long as they were four years or longer duration, you're fine holding Bitcoin. The people in the ecosystem that got hurt the most during the crypto winter were Bitcoin miners. And the reason they got hurt and the reason many of them were forced into liquidation is they were taking 12 month and 18-month loans that cost 15% and they weren't buying Bitcoin. They were buying Bitcoin mining rigs that depreciate 20% a year or 30% a year.

If you take a short duration loan and buy an asset that depreciates 30% a year, you're going to have a financial problem. If you take a mid duration or long duration loan and buy an asset appreciating 30 to 60% a year, you'll probably be fine. So I think that you would have to be very creative and quite cavalier to hurt yourself as a Bitcoin treasury company in the public market. Yeah, you might do it. There'll be a few that will do stupid things that will be financially irresponsible, but for the most part, you're gonna have three categories of Bitcoin treasury companies.

54:35 - Three Categories of Bitcoin Treasury Companies

Michael Saylor: You're going to have the pure play digital credit issuers that are laser-like focused. Our company, MetaPlanet, someone like probably Strive, I'm going to guess someone with a lot of equity capital that's going to just sell equity and pure credit and they're going to be laser like focused. They're going to 100x or a thousand x. Those are going to be the screaming equity winners. Those are going to be the next Mag Seven stocks, right? Those are companies that can go from a billion to a hundred billion or to a trillion, right?

Then you're going to have the strong Bitcoin players. Maybe they're not the single dominant player in their market, but they're strong Bitcoin. They got a lot of stuff going on. They'll 10x, 20x. They'll be good. They'll win, but they won't be the next Mag 7. They'll be like companies that buy a lot of Bitcoin and do some - it's not their laser like 150% focus, but they'll do some and they'll be strong performers, right?

And then you'll have companies that just buy some Bitcoin and they'll buy some Bitcoin and they'll have another business and over time the other business may trade sideways and the Bitcoin will actually support the equity market cap of the company. And so they're the ones that can't lose, but because they're not 100% focused on Bitcoin because they have another business, they have other liabilities, they'll grind up with the S&P and they'll be successful even if their core business doesn't work, right? But they'll still be low risk. Maybe they'll be two, three, 4x-er, right?

And I think you'll see all of that. It all comes down to the conviction of the management team and the business model. If you're saying, "Well, what would I like to be?" What you'd like to be is a pure play Bitcoin treasury company that issues equity and issues high quality Bitcoin credit. And you want to own that capital market. You want to be the category killer in the UK, in France, in Brazil, in Norway, in Japan, in the US, in Canada, right? In Germany, in Italy.

57:12 - Home Court Advantage and Regional Opportunities

Michael Saylor: The home champion is always going to have a home court. The national champion will have a home court advantage. You're going to have tax advantages, issuance advantages, regulatory advantages, marketing advantages, language, cultural advantages, and focus advantage. Right? When you get up and you issue the first digital credit instrument in pounds, you're smarter, and you're doing a 100 pound perpetual Bitcoin back credit in London or than you do in euros on the Frankfurt stock exchange, right? Or you do it in yen in Tokyo, right?

At that point, you're selling the strongest, highest yielding credit instrument in a capital market that's got garbage. Like, go to Switzerland. You know what the yield is for short-term money in Switzerland? It's negative. You have $10 million, you put it in a Swiss bank, they take money away from you. In fact, the yields are negative out to four years on the yield curve. So the risk-free cost of capital is literally less than zero.

A Swiss company with Bitcoin Capital selling something that pays you 400 basis points in Swiss Francs is offering 4% or 5% more than everything else. And there's like 800 billion that's getting eaten, why wouldn't that capital just start to flow, right? So why couldn't you issue $10 billion of Swiss Franc back credit? And if you basically have a cost of funds of 5% in Swiss Francs and you're investing in Bitcoin returning 50%. Think about how fast you can grow that business. You become the greatest Swiss bank, right? You become the greatest Swiss financial company in the entire nation and you do it in a matter of five years.

So you could become the MicroStrategy of Switzerland except you can do better than us. We got from 600 million to 12 billion or whatever 110 billion depending on the day. We got there in five years but we had to learn as we went along. We had to experiment and we had to go through 20 different credit issuances and we had to discard a lot of stuff. If you were doing it from scratch today, you would just skip the first four years. I would say here I already give you the answer. You raise equity capital. You buy Bitcoin. You put 100% of it into Bitcoin. And then you sell a Bitcoin-backed money market, a short duration credit instrument that just strips the duration to one month, strips the volatility, right? Strips the delta and just give people 500 basis points more yield than the risk-free rate in the capital market where you're selling the credit.

And you could literally have a company with one credit instrument trading publicly and one equity instrument, rinse and repeat, and you're going to grow as fast as you can educate the capital market that you're selling into, right? And you could in theory do what we did, but you could do it in half the time or a third of the time. It all comes down to how charismatic is the leader of the company. Are they trusted? Is the brand trusted? Are they laser-like focused?

1:00:51 - The Endgame: Building a Better Financial System

Pierre Rochard: Yeah, I love that answer. I think encouraging sort of an abundance mentality is much needed in a world where scarcity sort of dominates. You kind of answered my next question, but I do want to dig into STRC a little bit. Describe the endgame. Is it building a better bank you mentioned. Is that sort of where you see MicroStrategy heading? And right now I mean this product exists. People can put their money in it. It's a phenomenal asset to the market. Is it just a matter of educating the public that this exists or how do we continue to evolve?

Michael Saylor: Yeah. Well, I think the endgame is we accumulate a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin and then we grow it 20, 30, Bitcoin appreciates 21% a year in 21 years. And then we grow that capital by issuing more credit. So, we're growing faster than 21%. So the endgame is get to a trillion dollars of collateral growing 30% a year, be issuing $100 billion of credit a year, growing 20, 30% a year.

And that credit is yielding two, three, 400 basis points more than all of the real estate back credit, the corporate back credit, the fiat back credit, or any other type of credit instrument in the world, right?

And what's going on there then is you reinvigorate the credit markets instead of people having a credit - they're sick in Switzerland, right? Instead of getting zero in Switzerland, if someone is issuing if half the credit in Switzerland is digital, then the zero goes to two or 300 basis points. And because it goes to 300 basis points, maybe the risk-free rate goes up and financial repression becomes less common and more difficult, right? You're actually improving the traditional credit markets and you're offering Bitcoin believers something 3% better. Same thing in yen, right? Eventually, instead of trillions of dollars yielding 50 basis points, the average blended yield will go to 300 basis points or 400 basis points. And you return health and integrity to the credit markets everywhere in the world.

And it's done by some combination of Bitcoin treasury companies working in concert with each other, right? The Bitcoin network becomes a multi-hundred trillion dollar network. The amount of digital credit 10 trillion, 20 trillion, 100 trillion, right? What if there's a hundred trillion dollars of digital credit and hundreds, by the way, a hundred trillion in digital credit backed by 200 trillion worth of digital capital would be not fractional banking, right? You haven't got to one to one, you're still 2x over collateralized, which would be better than the very best AAA corporate investment grade debt in the United States is like two and a half times over-collateralized. So it's all AAA investment grade but with more yield and more transparency.

1:04:26 - Transforming the Global Financial System

Michael Saylor: So I see the endgame as the credit markets are reinvigorated and digitally transformed to be backed by Bitcoin, digital gold, digital capital. And I see the equity markets are reinvigorated because the equities, the equity indexes all start to hold these companies, right? We creep into the equity indexes, Metaplanet gets into the equity indexes, and then pretty soon all these companies in the S&P 500, they all have Bitcoin. And if all these companies have Bitcoin, then the S&P index substantially has a component of Bitcoin and Bitcoin's going up 21% a year, right? So companies get healthier, credit gets less risky yields, your savings account doesn't give you 0% in Switzerland or half a percent in Japan or 2% in Europe or one. It gives you six, seven, 8, 10. Right?

So I think the 20th century banking networks get transformed. The 20th century credit networks get transformed. The 20th century equity capital markets get transformed. Bitcoin becomes the foundation of the 21st century digital credit, digital equity, digital banking, digital capital, digital economy and Bitcoin treasury companies are the engines, the drivers, the dynamos powering up that network and the experimentation is extraordinary. There's a Cambrian explosion of ideas. The way you do it in South America is different than the way you do it in North America.

At some point, Bitcoin will find its way on the balance sheet of insurance companies and it'll find its way on the balance sheet of actual banks and tech companies and if you start to re-imagine insurance powered by Bitcoin is a different world better insurance and reimagining bank accounts powered by Bitcoin. What happens when your bank offers you a money market that's not fiat powered? Because the fiat powered money market would pay you 420 basis points right now, but a Bitcoin powered money market would pay you 10.2%, 1,020 basis points right now.

So as banking gets reinvigorated and as insurance gets invigorated and when the Apples and the Googles are custodying and offering Bitcoin via all their rails, then you've got a digital transformation that's an invigoration and we start to reach a digital economy which is smarter, faster, stronger, 10x better, 10x more productive, maybe a 100x more productive. And the people that are in that economy win, and the people that are blocked from that economy look like the North Koreans where their lights go out at night, they get locked off the power grid. And hopefully it'll be such a compelling future that no one will want to be locked off the grid. Your choice is to be smart and fast and strong and rich or you could be stupid and slow and broke and weak and poor.

1:08:00 - Credit Creation vs. Credit Extension

Pierre Rochard: So, do you anticipate in that sort of future MicroStrategy being in a position where you might extend Bitcoin credit to institutions, distressed institutions or sovereigns at some point in the future?

Michael Saylor: Yeah. Well, when we sell credit, we don't buy it. So, when you say extend credit, we won't be making a loan to them. We will be offering them our credit instrument. So if you're a nation state and you want 10% yield, you'll buy our credit instead of buying something that yields 3%. Right? We will sell the credit, create the credit, right? And I think our view is we want to create not 10 billion but a hundred billion and then a trillion dollars and then trillions of dollars worth of credit backed by digital capital.

1:09:00 - Future Trends and Opportunities

Pierre Rochard: We talked a little bit about the different types of treasury companies, the pure plays versus companies that have a significant operating business. What trends haven't you seen that you're anticipating or kind of what's the alpha here? What should companies continue to experiment with that you think would be effective?

Michael Saylor: I think that there's an opportunity for crypto exchanges to be more aggressive adopting a Bitcoin treasury strategy. I think we might see that. I think we could see more adoption from the Geminis of the world or the Blocks or the Coinbases of the world because they're now publicly traded entities in the capital markets. And so you might see something interesting there.

I think insurance companies, especially public insurance companies, could start to embrace digital capital and they have a lot of capital to invest and so they could move their own balance sheet so they could start to change the way they operate.

I think there are a lot of financial players that are innovative. The Apollos, the BlackRocks, the Blackstones of the world, they're publicly traded. So you would wonder if you're a BlackRock and you just had the most successful ETF in history, maybe you might want to hold some Bitcoin on your own balance sheet. Right. And take advantage of that.

So, I think you'll start to see more interesting credit instruments or equity instruments created by financially sophisticated players in the crypto economy. And if it doesn't come from the big players that are established right now, then you'll see the smaller startups, the pure Bitcoin treasury companies, they'll get into the space because there's a vacuum. Just like Coinbase is filling a vacuum left by traditional banks because the banks don't want to custody Bitcoin. So Coinbase has got the ability to fill it.

If the insurance companies or the crypto exchanges don't embrace Bitcoin, well, then you'll see smaller startups like Strike or something that will embrace it, right? And if you go public and you start to raise a lot of capital and then you build it into your wallet or you build it into a credit offering or something, then I think that could be compelling.

1:11:27 - M&A Strategy and Bitcoin as the Perfect Acquisition

Pierre Rochard: So, as things kind of continue to play out, the game theory is interesting. It's compelling. How do you think about the future when it comes to maybe consolidation or M&A opportunities with Bitcoin treasury companies in a significant drawdown? Is MicroStrategy sort of the buyer of last resort in these scenarios?

Michael Saylor: No. I tell everybody. I expect Bitcoin to go up 29% a year on average for the next 21 years, right? I'm expecting $21 million Bitcoin in 21 years. So I expect Bitcoin to appreciate 21% a year thereafter. The risk-free rate is 29%. If I do nothing, take no risk. If you're in the Bitcoin network, every single investment idea you consider has got a return more than 29% plus a risk premium plus another premium for the headache. And even if you did that, there's a diversification discount.

And the thing you got to keep in mind when you're running a public company is there is a diversification discount. If people look at my company and they say 100% of the risk and 100% of the return is levered to Bitcoin. It's a very easy business model. You can go to our website. You can crank in the Bitcoin volatility, the Bitcoin ARR, the Bitcoin price, and it spits out the risks, the fair credit spread, everything. It's very simple. You can update it every 15 seconds.

If we were to go and buy another company, buy X billion dollar company that we think was 40% undervalued, now it takes like an hour for someone to figure out whether that's right and wrong. And it takes 10 years for them to know we were right or wrong. You've just created a diversification discount. You've turned something which was transparent where I know exactly what I'm getting in 15 seconds to something where if I believe you after an hour maybe it's better. But how many ideas do you have that are guaranteed to return 40% a year for the next 20 years? I've never seen a public company that ever did an acquisition that promised 40% return every year for 20 years, right?

So when you think about Bitcoin, the right way to think about it is you're a public company. You have a billion dollars of capital. You have an option. You could go buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin at one times revenue and it's growing 55% a year. You can buy something growing 55% a year at one times revenue, right? And all of your investors already understand it and support it. Long-term, you can buy something that's going to grow 29% a year. No risk. No integration headache. You can buy something growing nearly 30% a year at one times revenue and all of your investors back it. Right? There's no one holding our equity that doesn't believe in Bitcoin. They're all Bitcoin maximalists.

So why would you do anything other than do the same acquisition at one times revenue of something that's hyper growing monopoly growing 30% a year? We've done that like 77 times or something. Right. So when I look at M&A, I think the perfect M&A partner is Bitcoin. You have a chance to buy the dominant digital monetary network growing 30% a year for the next 20 years with zero risk and keep doing the trade over and over and over again. Why would you ever do anything else? And when you do the other thing, you're going to create opacity. You're going to create a diversification discount. Conglomerates normally trade at a discount to their net asset value because people think that was a dilutive transaction and it was a dilutive acquisition. It's distracting.

So I think that there is a place for companies to buy a Bitcoin treasury company trading at less than NAV. It won't be us, right? The world's full of companies that do M&A. There's a lot of people that would rather buy equity. There are private equity investors and there are public companies. They like to buy other companies. That's their business model.

By the way, none of those companies are Bitcoin maximalist with 100% of their balance sheet invested in Bitcoin. They're not Bitcoin maxis. There's a lot of, if you're a fiat maxi or if you're a whatever maximalist and you might look and say, "Hey, I believe in this company and it's trading, I can get the business for free because it's trading at its Bitcoin balance sheet." You'll go buy that company because you feel like you're getting the operating business for free and you're getting the Bitcoin in the mix, right? And that's what will support the value of that company.

So, I think it makes sense. You buy a retailer losing money that's valued at its Bitcoin. They'll get bought by another retailer, right? And the other retailer will be like, I'm going to get rid of the cost and I'm going to rationalize the business and I'm going to strip out the Bitcoin because I see the value in the Bitcoin, but I don't want to be in the retail business. I don't want to be in a money losing business. If the business is trading less than the Bitcoin, it's because the marketplace perceives a liability in the operating business. Right.

And so I'm buying the world's greatest business in the world, the digital monopoly growing 29% a year for the next 20 years that all of my investors love. I'm buying that. Why would I want to go buy a bunch of troubled businesses that have problems that I have to solve and I'm going to be throwing my investors money to solve the problem? That's not what they want, right?

So, it doesn't make sense for a pure play to buy another Bitcoin treasury company or to buy another company with Bitcoin. It totally makes sense for a private equity investor or an LBO or another conglomerate. They've got all their own dynamics. They'll do the trade. It will be a benefit to them. It will be a benefit to the Bitcoin treasury company that will, the equity will trade up more, right? And it all just comes down to what is your cost of capital? And if you're a Bitcoin maximalist, your risk-free cost of capital is 29%. If that's what you believe Bitcoin's going up at for the next 20 years, and that's what I believe. Most people don't have a risk-free rate of 29%. There's a lot of fiat maxi in Switzerland. Their risk-free rate is minus 50 basis points. So other companies will have other cost of capitals and other outlooks because of their frame of reference. They will actually do those transactions.

1:18:58 - Global Opportunities and Market Analysis

Pierre Rochard: Well, you just keep buying Bitcoin there. That makes sense. So, I mean, does this playbook work in every public market? I mean, there's some untapped markets. We haven't seen really anything happen in Africa yet. Where does the most opportunity exist that you see? Is there markets that are being overlooked right now?

Michael Saylor: Well, for every company in the world in any capital market, they're always better off to buy Bitcoin as their capital asset. If you're in Cuba, it might be illegal in Cuba, but you're still better off as a Cuban company to capitalize on Bitcoin, right? North Korea might be illegal, but you're still better off, right? So, barring the legality of whether you can do it, you're better off in Venezuela and Nigeria, every country in Africa, you're better off to hold the Bitcoin for the obvious reason that it's going up 55% a year and it's going to go up nearly 30% a year in dollars and most other capital assets are either collapsing against the dollar. Local credit, local currency is collapsing against the dollar in Africa, right? Or it's pegged to the dollar, right? And so every company should capitalize on Bitcoin.

Now the next question is if you're a public company investor, where could you create the screaming MetaPlanet or MicroStrategy return? How do you get a 10x or 100x return on your equity? The most compelling opportunities are mature large capital markets suffering from financial repression.

So what you'd like to find is a capital market like the Swiss or the Japanese. It's big. There's a trillion dollars in it. But the risk-free rate or look at the one month government T-bill rate and when it's zero or when it's 50 basis points, Bitcoin's giving you 55%. You can borrow money at 5%. If you offer 500 basis points more than zero, you borrow 5%, five and a half, then you've got massive leverage. You're investing at something like 30% over the next 20 years and you're borrowing at five. That means you're capturing 100% of the spread up front and you're capturing initially 80-85% and it's compounding to 95% over the decade. So you're capturing 100% on the front end and 90% plus on the back end and you can generate four or five x leverage or 50% leverage or 60 or 70% leverage on your balance sheet you could do 4x the Bitcoin return five six 7x the Bitcoin return so in theory a pure play company in one of those markets in any European and euro market where the risk-free rate is 200 basis points. Switzerland, Japan, those are all great.

If the US rate comes down to 200 basis points, that's very bullish for every single US Bitcoin treasury company, right? Because now you can offer 7% dividend yield. Invest in Bitcoin. You'll capture 90% of the back end, 100% of the front end. It's a screaming profitable business for you.

1:22:40 - Tokenization and the Future of Digital Assets

Pierre Rochard: I want to talk a little bit about this narrative of tokenizing the world. It seems to be one that doesn't really go away. What's your take on sort of how this plays out in the Bitcoin ecosystem? What's the next asset that gets tokenized?

Michael Saylor: Well, I mean, the idea is you'd like to move everything at the speed of light and so why not tokenize dollars? Why not even Bitcoin tokenized on the lightning network, right? Or tokenized somehow. Everybody wants to move the Bitcoin in a second, then they'll want to move it in a millisecond, right? So tokenized Bitcoin on a layer three would actually abuse, right? You can tokenize every stock, every bond, right? BlackRock has tokenized US treasuries in one of their instruments and if you tokenized Apple stock or Microsoft stock then people could take custody of Apple stock in India on Saturday afternoon. So tokenization makes the entire capital markets work more efficiently, more egalitarian, faster, smarter, stronger. And it also provides the power of self-custody or quasi self-custody, right? It takes you to a point where if you tokenize on a decentralized network, then equities and securities could look more like bearer instruments, right? When you're holding the security at a regulated custodian in New York City and you're on the sanction list, you can't - you lose custody of that, right? So tokenization could provide a quasi, a higher property right and a higher utility to a lot of financial assets that have value to people.

Right now I think where we're at is there's broad consensus that things should be tokenized. There is support from Atkins at the SEC and Contez at the CFTC, and from the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessant, that we should lead in digital assets, which means tokenization of all form of assets. We only have one law, the Genius Act, which kind of touches on the tokenization of dollars, but it goes part way to establish a framework for the tokenization of dollars, but it doesn't fully empower them to be utilized. I mean there are a lot of constraints in the Genius Act like for example you can't offer a yield on a tokenized dollar unless you're a bank right so there are some constraints and there are some obligations but there's also some legitimization. And the Genius Act the Clarity Act is really the next thing up on the docket which will be the priority this fall probably for the rest of the year and there at some point there'll be some understanding of whether you can or cannot tokenize, but the Clarity Act doesn't fully embrace the idea of digital securities yet. So, it's not clear to me whether or not you'll have tokenized securities of stocks and bonds and real world assets codified into law even after that act. And so, there's going to be a gray area about what the law allows you to do.

And because there's a bit of a gray zone, that actually creates some ambiguity about what's the right technical approach. For example, if the law said it's okay to tokenize this stuff and move it peer-to-peer at the speed of light, there's nothing that stops Apple from tokenizing every stock on the Apple Pay network. But because the law doesn't make it clear whether Apple has liability if you transfer securities between sanctioned individuals in India, right, it kind of is going to slow down Apple which means that the decentralized networks or quasi decentralized networks will have an advantage because they could tokenize and they don't need regulatory clarity. And so I think that we're moving toward a world of de facto recognition of digital securities and digital tokens from the SEC and the CFDC and it'll come through the rules process, but we don't quite have it yet. And I don't know if we'll get in law legitimization or legitimacy for tokenized stocks, bonds or other crypto tokens. Not for a while. So I would say we're in this in between period where there'll be leadership probably the leadership will come from the cabinet. The industry will adopt things. They'll become de facto standards. And as the de facto standards build, you'll see a lot of capital flow in to these standards. And maybe they'll be codified in law before 2028. Maybe they won't. Maybe there'll be some controversy over it. I can't say at this point.

The only thing that's very clear to me, right, that the greatest regulatory clarity is Bitcoin is a digital commodity and you can hold it as a store of value and you can issue digital credit against it. I think a certain lesser clarity is you can create a stable coin if you're a corporation and not pay interest on it and you can create a stable coin if you're a bank and maybe you can pay maybe you can tokenize your deposits. There's a little bit of clarity there. And I think the rest is it's a wild west, but it's a wild west in a liberal progressive political environment where there's support from the White House and the SEC, Treasury, and the CFTC. And two years ago, it was a wild west, but in a regressive, cynical, skeptical environment without political support where the White House, the SEC, the CFTC, and Treasury were against. And so that's where we stand today.

Pierre Rochard: Love that. Michael, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for having us. Really appreciate the conversation and thanks for hosting us.

Michael Saylor: Yeah, my pleasure. All right.