In a world where most CEOs prioritize sleep and work-life balance, Paolo Ardoino operates on a different frequency—literally waking up every hour throughout the night to check notifications, a routine he's maintained for 11 years. As the CEO of Tether, the company behind USDT—the world's most widely used stablecoin—Ardoino has built what he calls "a once in a century company" with a staggering 99% profit margin and approximately $100 million in profit per employee. But this isn't a story about wealth accumulation. It's about a mission to bring financial stability to the three billion people worldwide who lack access to basic banking services. From his humble beginnings coding games at age eight in a small Italian town of 600 people to now exploring a $20 billion raise at a $500 billion valuation, Ardoino's journey reveals a man obsessed with a singular vision: using technology to democratize finance and create stability in an increasingly chaotic world. In this conversation, he opens up about why Tether invested in everything from blockchain infrastructure to Juventus Football Club, and why he believes the company is only 0.25% into its ultimate potential.

Guest: Paolo Ardoino, Co-founder & CEO of Tether

Host: MR SHIFT, Host of When Shift Happens

Podcast: USDT Founder: Bitcoin, Gold, Stablecoin, & Tether, the Most Profitable Company in the World | EP 143, When Shift Happens

When: Oct 16, 2025

Sleeping 5 Hours Per Night with 1-Hour Intervals

Host: How much do you sleep per night?

Paolo Ardoino: I have a very particular routine. I try to sleep at least 5 hours per night, but the problem is that they are fragmented because I keep on the notifications. Working like every 1 hour, I wake up and check the notifications and then go back to sleep.

Host: Wow. So you have an alarm every 1 hour. You have the notification sound on always, all the time. When did you start that?

Paolo: 11 years ago.

Host: 11 years ago. You've been sleeping 5 hours a night with a break every 1 hour. Do you do naps during the day?

Paolo: No, not even. No. I get shitfaced if I do naps. I cannot do that. It's because of Bitfinex, right? I still run the exchange, and the exchange requires to be up and running all the time.

Tether's Mission: Infusing Stability in a Dark World

Host: What is your mission?

Paolo: My mission is to infuse stability in a world that is going towards darkness. I believe that—and it's kind of weird, right—the success of Tether is directly proportional to the failure of many things in the world. If the world was fair on the financial side and if finance would be accessible, USDT would not have any reason to exist.

The reason to exist of USDT is to bring stability to people in emerging markets. Now, I'm a developer, a technologist. I think we are building among the best technology for telecommunications, for social media, and a few other areas including energy. We want to devote our resources to disintermediate many other industries and make them open and accessible, like what we did with USDT and finance. That is basically our mission.

The vast majority of the profits we make are not distributed to the shareholders. It's like 95% of the profits are kept in the company or invested in new things, new ideas to support our world. That is my mission. I don't have much hobbies. Actually, I don't have any hobbies. My hobby is to continue to think about this every single day. I'm a guy that gets obsessed. I get down into the rabbit hole, and that's basically the entirety of my life.

The Stable Company Philosophy

Host: You wrote, "While the world continues to get darker, Tether will continue to invest part of its profit into safe assets like Bitcoin, gold, and land. Tether is a stable company." What is the stable company?

Paolo: A journalist asked me how to define Tether in a few words. He tried to do it for me and said, "Oh, Tether is the stable coin company." I said no, it's the stable company.

I think the more technology is accessible to people, the more finance is accessible to people, there are less incentives for people to screw it up and create instability. Chaos derives and bursts only if people are unhappy, if their life is very difficult.

The stability in the world is, in my opinion, linked to the fact that there is huge disparity and a growing disparity between countries, between certain worlds. Technology, for the last 20-30 years, on one side has been trying to fill the gap, but actually it increased the gap by a large factor. Finance as well. Half of the population of the world does not have access to finance or does not have access to a bank account in a stable way—not because there are bad people, just because they are too poor to be of interest to the banks.

Democratizing access to finance and democratizing access to technology—making technology peer-to-peer, decentralized—we believe the world will end up being more stable. If people have stability in their lives, within their families, within their communities, within their cities and countries, they have less incentive to create chaos.

A stable company is a company that focuses on the stability of society as the ultimate goal. We prove that we can build a company—it's not wishful thinking. The more we worked in that direction, the more we became profitable. That's why I define Tether as a once in a century company. Not because I want to be cocky or arrogant, but because Tether is the only company where the more it pushes for open source, for openness, for decentralization, the more it makes money.

The Chip on the Shoulder

Host: There's a common pattern amongst my guests. They have something that happened in their life that gave them a chip on the shoulder. How much of Tether's mission today is linked to something that you might not have had when you were younger?

Paolo: I think I'm a very lucky person. My family was definitely not rich, but the only—well, not the only—the main thing that I believe I learned from my family is working very hard.

I remember my grandparents had a small farm in Italy. They were producing the best olive oil, the best tomatoes. They were putting so much care in having the best tomatoes, the best sage, rosemary, asparagus that they could. That was their passion, and they were dedicating their lives to it. My grandfather was waking up at 5:00, then taking a nap at 1:00, and then going back up to evening. That was his life forever, and he was very happy. He only did elementary school but was very good in math.

My mother was teaching in a kindergarten, and my father was an employee at the local national energy company in Italy. But after work, they were bringing us to do some sports and then going to the farm to help the grandparents. Basically from morning to night, the routine was wake up, work hard, and do something but with extreme passion. I never heard my parents complaining, my grandparents complaining. That was their mission. Everyone should have their own mission, and it should be small or big—it doesn't matter as long as you are happy.

When people sometimes say, "Oh, but you work hard," I say no, I mean, I saw what working hard means. I'm definitely not working hard.

Starting to Code at 8 Years Old

Host: You started coding when you were eight. How did that happen?

Paolo: My father was working at the national energy company, and in Italy, the public companies were the first ones that started to deal with computers in the effort of modernizing and expediting the work. Italy is not known for the best bureaucracy and is known for everything taking a long time. So in the effort of changing things, in the early '90s, the local energy company started to use computers.

My father loved that so much that when I was 7 years old, he came back home with a computer. He told me, "This is very expensive—it's two salaries. Don't break it and pay good attention." Of course, as a single kid, we had floppy discs and we were playing games, but we couldn't afford much. Games were not easy to find in 1990-91 in a small place in Italy with 600 people.

I started playing with the computer, and then eventually I ran out of games. I said, "I want to build my own games, make my own games." I asked my father to buy me a book on how to code games. He said, "Paolo, I can, but it costs 60,000 lire. Are you sure because it's very expensive?" I said yeah, I want to do it. He brought the book home, and I started learning. Then I started coding, and that became my passion. I did that throughout university and basically till now.

Coding: Liberating Human Imagination

Host: You wrote, "Coding is unlike any other form of expression, liberates the human imagination, and enables us to build entirely new worlds with endless possibilities." Can you elaborate?

Paolo: I've always been a mess in any sort of art. I cannot—I mean, I'm a fine guitar player, although I don't play since many years—but everything else was a mess. You know when you did the art classes and you had technical design? Every single one of my drawings ended up being a mess. I was putting my arms everywhere. I was terrible. I cannot draw, I cannot paint, I cannot sing, I cannot do many things, even in a basic form.

People use art through paintings and all that to express themselves, to express emotions. I understood that my way to express myself and to invite people—because usually when you do art, you do that and you invite people into your own world. To me, I was able to create my own worlds and invite people into my world through coding.

Stablecoins Explained Simply

Host: You used coding to create stablecoin. What is a stablecoin if you had to explain it to your mom?

Paolo: People are used to cash, which is the physical money. A lot of money now is already digital. What you have in your bank account is digital money—like a digital dollar that you have already or digital euro. But that money stays confined in your bank servers.

A stablecoin is a digital dollar that uses blockchain technology to be transferred, to be sent. It becomes borderless since blockchains are just big databases—decentralized databases that are borderless, are global. They are not sitting in one data center. They are all around the world. So we use the best form of database for money, which is a decentralized database, to move dollars.

Why Are Stablecoins So Important?

Host: Why are stablecoins so important to our world?

Paolo: Stablecoins are important because three billion people in the world don't have access to finance. They are the ones that live in high inflation countries. I mean, Europe has an inflation rate of 30-34% per year—the official one. Turkey has 50%, Nigeria is higher, and Argentina at some point had like 200%. These countries are in a very dire situation.

Now in 2025, everyone is interested in stablecoins. In the US, in Europe, everyone wants to launch a stablecoin as a way to make money because they looked at us and said, "Oh, it's profitable, then I want a stablecoin myself." But the reality is that stablecoins are much more important for the people that don't have access to the dollar.

If you live in the US, you have maybe one or two bank accounts, two credit cards, cash, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal. In your life, you rarely experience issues for sending money. In the United States and Europe, financial rails and financial technology is 90% efficient—everything works basically all the time. If you go to certain countries in Africa, the efficiency of financial rails is like 5%.

So if you use a stablecoin, from 5% you go to 60-70%. While if you use a stablecoin in Europe or in the United States, from 90% you go to 92-95%. There are much more gains in using stablecoins in the emerging market. That's why for these people it's life-changing, because it brings them back into a world that is becoming more digital.

Internet is starting to do that—internet is a way to invite people in a global context. But internet without access to finance doesn't matter. Even if you can browse Amazon and you can buy anything that's there, there's no point. I think stablecoins are actually the ultimate social network in that sense, because money is, in my opinion, the ultimate social network. It's about human interaction, peer-to-peer interaction, and it includes in itself—contains in itself—also both the sense of value and information that you want to transfer.

The Most Profitable Business Per Employee in the World

Host: You mentioned before, you said Tether is the best business in the world. You wrote Tether has a 99% profit margin. How did you build the most profitable business per employee in the world, doing about $100 million in profit per employee per year? Did you think about that?

Paolo: No. It's—to run—I like efficiency. Everything that I do, I think why I need so—how can we make it better? How can we make it more efficient? Up until two years ago, we were 40 people in Tether. Now we are like 250-300 because we hired a lot of developers because we are expanding in AI and all the other directions. But the core stablecoin is managed by 100 people.

The beauty of it is that, first of all, we are living in a moment where the interest rates are high. Up to 2022, interest rates were not high, so we could not predict that. I think very few could predict that. There was the pandemic—hard to predict. So all these situations are definitely helping our profitability. We believe that expanding in different areas, which we are doing, will help our profitability long-term to maintain this ratio.

Why Raise $20 Billion?

Host: You just announced that you're exploring a $20 billion raise at a $500 billion valuation. What the hell would you do with $20 billion if you got them tomorrow?

Paolo: Well, Tether made last year $13.7 billion, and this year will probably make the same. I'm going to use—maybe it's not the right context, but I will use anyway—a quote that I like. It's not about the money, it's about sending a message. That is from the Joker in Batman.

The reason why it's so important is because the message that we want to send is that the mission of Tether is probably 100-fold from here. A guy once—I was in Abu Dhabi—and he asked me a question. I said, well, I'm a big fan of Peter Thiel, so I was reading the book *From Zero to One*. Of course, that is not anymore a startup—it makes so much money. So instead of saying from zero to one, from where you are from zero to 100, I said 0.25. I have it in my notes.

The reason I said that is because it's not about how much money we are making—it's about the potential that I think we need to still express, that we have in our minds. This opportunity—again, I define Tether as a once in a century company or opportunity because I believe every company needs three things: You need to have philosophy—you need to have ethos or philosophy. You need to have a sense of direction, who you want to be. You need to have innovation—the ability to innovate in tech or in other areas. And third, you need to have the capital.

Most companies have one or two out of three. You can be the best innovator and do it for the right things, have the right philosophy, but you don't have the money. So you need to raise money and go to a VC. But the problem is that the VC has the incentive to make much more money than the one that invested in you. So the VC will derail your initial project, your initial philosophy, your initial idea of what you wanted to build.

I think Tether in this situation has the capital, the philosophy, and the tech innovation to do whatever it wants. The message we're giving is we have so much to demonstrate still. We want to grow so much. Our vision is incredible. We want to have partners that are joining our company to help us build that vision because it's so unique, it's so powerful, and we don't want to screw this up. It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.

Does Paolo Have Free Time?

Host: You mentioned a movie. You also mentioned you sleep 5 hours a night. When do you have time to watch movies?

Paolo: I sometimes watch snippets of movies, but I try to watch like one movie per week. Otherwise, in a certain way, movies are a representation of reality. You need to stay in touch with the world, right? I wish I could read more. I wish I would have more time to listen to podcasts. Probably I put it on 2x just to try to absorb as much as possible. I'm thinking with our AI platform to create a podcast summary because there are many arguments that are interesting, and it's definitely hard to be able to follow all of them. I wish I could definitely read more if I have more spare time.

Why Tether Invested in Plasma

Host: Tether invested in a company called Plasma whose founder Paul was on this podcast too. He's the one who helped us set this up. Why is Plasma so important to the world that Tether invested in them?

Paolo: I think Tether USDT is one part of the technology. As I said, stablecoins are digital dollars that move on blockchain technology. Unfortunately, blockchain technology in the last many years has focused itself on maybe the wrong incentives and the wrong things. It was much more important for blockchain developers to be able to have a blockchain with a lot of hype and the ability to list meme coins as fast as possible—dogs with hats and things like that. That is maybe fine for the short—I don't like it at all—but surely some of these teams made money in the short term.

I think USDT is the living proof that if you create something that is useful for the real world, then you can actually change the world. I think stablecoins based on—or kind of single-purpose blockchains—I don't think Plasma is single purpose, but focused blockchains on stablecoins that can make stablecoins very cheap to transfer, that can make stablecoins easy to use.

Right now, for example, if you have a stablecoin on Ethereum, you need to buy ETH as a token in order to move USDT. We need better user experience. I think that after many, many years in this industry, the quality of the user experience is still very low because we focus on the wrong things. We focused only on our own echo chamber, which is geeks basically, and people that have the time to spend to learn something new in order for greed.

But the majority of the people—and that's the reason why USDT is so popular out there—is because USDT is not talking to people that want to speculate. There is an interesting statistic: 67% of all the transactions that move USDT on blockchain only send USDT. Instead, only 20% of the transactions that involve other stablecoins move also other assets. So it means that people that are using—most of the people that are using USDT—are only using USDT because they want a dollar.

The other statistic was actually 80%—it's reversed. 80% of the people that move other stablecoins also move other assets. So it means that people that have other stablecoins are also moving other assets. They use basically other stablecoins to trade in DeFi, for example. I much more prefer to have tens of millions of people living in Africa than 10,000 bankers living in New York as my user base.

Why Tether Owns 10% of Juventus Football Club

Host: Another investment that Tether did was completely unrelated. The Juventus football club. Tether owns 10%. Why would a stablecoin company invest in a football club?

Paolo: There are multiple reasons. First of all, both me and Giancarlo are big football fans of Juventus. Giancarlo is from Piedmont in Italy, which is where Juventus is from. I grew up nearby Genoa, nearby Savona, which is 80-100 kilometers from Turin. All the people from Turin were going on holiday nearby my hometown, so there was a huge influence of Juventus fans coming from Turin to my hometown. My father became a Juventus fan, and so I became a Juventus fan. Giancarlo was a Juventus fan.

But also, we believe that the Italian soccer—or football, I prefer probably football is the right one—the football environment is very old and outdated in Italy. Entrepreneurs were used to owning football clubs because of power and control. Usually entrepreneurs had newspapers, had football clubs, and they were then having political activities so that you could use them as a political weapon.

The reality is that what we are seeing outside of Italy now with Chelsea, with Manchester United, with PSG—the world of football is modernizing. These companies have hundreds of millions of fans all around the world. I think almost everyone likes football, so it's a good, simple way to reach people everywhere without distinction—rich or poor.

We wish that the Italian football environment would become more modernized, would look more at the opportunities of a football club to interact with the user base and interact with its fans and spread its values. Also capitalize as a company because it's a company that needs to make profit on the quality of its team, of course, and the ability to win, but also on its ability to reach and engage its fan base, which is not happening, I think, with any of the clubs in Italy.

We wish that we can demonstrate a change in Italy through our investment in Juventus, and we would like to help Juventus to become more forward-looking and international as a way of thinking compared to what it is today.

Host: Thank you so much, Paolo, for taking the time to do this. It's truly incredible to see what you're doing. And as you said, we feel like it's just starting—0.25% of the journey. I can't wait to see what the next 99.75% of the Tether journey looks like.

Paolo: Thank you very much for having me. It's very fun.

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