Top Bitcoin Holder: He Asked AI to Build Something That NEVER Existed, Here's What Happened!
In a Nutshell
**Bitcoin is the best-performing capital asset (33% annually vs. S&P at 15%, gold at 12%) because it can't be confiscated, debased, or restricted by banks/governments like fiat or physical assets.** Michael Saylor used AI to create the first Bitcoin-backed convertible preferred stock (STRK), raising $10.5B+ in the year's biggest IPO by asking AI to solve a problem no one had ever solved before. The core strategy: use AI to create scarce, hard-to-replicate innovations rather than competing with automation, while holding Bitcoin as digital property that appreciates 20-30% annually for the next 20 years.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
I used AI to make 15 billion dollars last year. The AI gave us a solution to the problem that no one had ever encountered before in the history of the world. The advice is don't try to outwork the robots. What you want to do is ask the AI to do something that's never been done before. If you want to create these incredible success things, you want to locate the magic opportunity. This comes from being a technology entrepreneur and the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world.
The mission is preaching the gospel of digital empowerment. Bitcoin is digital money and it's going to be the best long-term capital asset. You can actually own something and someone more powerful than you can't take it away from you.
Physical cash presents problems at airports where authorities can seize it. Putting money in banks means the bank decides whether you get to keep it and get it back. Bitcoin allows moving a million dollars from anywhere to London to anywhere in cyberspace in a few seconds. The last thing in the world you want to save is money.
Gold is up 12% a year, but Bitcoin is up 33%. The S&P 500 performance is half of what Bitcoin delivers. Bitcoin provides double the performance compared to the S&P index.
Michael Saylor recently sold some Bitcoin after previously telling people to sell a kidney if you must but keep the Bitcoin. The question is why sell Bitcoin instead of a kidney.
Beyond just buying Bitcoin, there are 10 rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career.
Michael Saylor always wanted to make a technical contribution. The early business was business intelligence - extracting intelligence from large raw data sources. MicroStrategy became a global business intelligence company. In 2020 when the COVID lockdowns took place and the world turned upside down, Saylor discovered Bitcoin. The company today is worth $60 billion but peaked at about $125 billion, representing 100 to 200 times growth since discovering Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is digital empowerment and digital capital. We're living through the digital transformation of assets, which is just as profound a transformation as digital intelligence. The real profound breakthrough of Bitcoin is the idea that you can take economic energy, convert it to digital form and tightly bind it to the person, the family, the company, or the country. The history of the world shows weak countries getting smashed by big countries.
If you're interested in empowerment and fairness and equity for the small company, the small family, the small person, the small country, the weak, you encrypt the money, put it in cyberspace, and protect it with a private key. Now you can actually own something and someone more powerful than you can't take it away from you.
Physical currency stacks present problems. When walking through an airport with cash, authorities can ask if you have cash and simply take it. Cash in physical form is a problem. Putting it in a bank means the bank becomes a counterparty that decides whether you get to keep it and whether you get it back. Banks may ask why you're withdrawing money, and large withdrawals trigger Treasury Department forms. If you ask for too much money back too soon, someone comes knocking on your door.
Fiat currency is held at the pleasure of the nation state, and every country on earth gets to decide whether you get to spend this money. Transferring money to another country requires permission from your bank, another bank, the central bank of their country, and the correspondent bank. There might be seven different banks that have to decide whether the money gets from here to there. This is permissioned money managed by the state.
With Bitcoin, you can take a million dollars, encrypt it in a chip in a physical coin like the Casascius coin, and it's literally a million dollars. You slide it across and it's a bearer asset. You could also put it into information form by transferring a private key written on a piece of paper. You could send a text message with a series of letters.
Getting a million dollars of gold from here to London is difficult if people don't want you to move it, but moving a million dollars of Bitcoin to anywhere takes a few seconds. The idea was not wanting to trust Apple, Google, Morgan Bank, a central bank, or a government.
In the extreme case, two people can meet in Africa and trade Bitcoin for a truck without needing permission from seven banks, 16 governments, and 32 other bureaucrats.
Most people think if they have $10,000 in their bank getting 4% interest, they're going to be good. However, one acre of land in Miami Beach on the water cost $10,000 about a hundred years ago. Today that same acre on the water costs $10 million to maybe $20 million. This represents a 1,000x increase in price, meaning the dollar lost about 7% of its economic value every year for 100 years running.
If you lose 7% a year, your money gets cut in half, then cut by 10 times. The US dollar, the best currency in the 20th and 21st century, lost 7% of its value every year for 100 years. Most other countries lose 14% of their value annually, collapsing in about 30 years. The average fiat currency collapses in about 29 years. For citizens of the greatest nation in the world, the half-life is 35 years, meaning you lose your money over the course of a hundred years.
A house purchased for $100,000 in 1926 in Miami Beach would be worth $50 to $100 million today. However, there are reasons not to buy a house. There's a 2% property tax on houses in Florida, meaning if you buy a house, you pay 2% of the value every year. At 2%, every 36 years you actually pay the cost of the house in tax to the government. This makes houses not a very good store of value because you're taking on a massive tax load and maintenance load.
Having said that, it's still a better deal than just holding cash in a bank or holding cash in a safe. Commercial real estate looks better because you can offset the tax, insurance, and maintenance costs with rents. With commercial real estate, you buy a million dollars of property, have fees, charge rent, and the rent offsets maintenance costs. You don't really make money on the rent, but the underlying million dollars appreciates 7% a year. You can build wealth with commercial real estate if you can cover the maintenance expenses.
Most people are told that the way to build wealth when they leave university is to buy a house. They get a job, take the money from that, get a mortgage, buy a house, and move in. The only way buying a house is a good strategy is if you're buying in a jurisdiction where property taxes are manageable. But if you end up taking a 7% mortgage with massive tax and insurance expenses, that investment crushes you.
A better idea generally is commercial real estate if you have the business acumen to get in the commercial real estate business because you can pass all the expenses through to your tenants. Real estate business is hard. Starting your own company is hard. Investing in other companies is hard.
The conventional safe thing is putting all money in a money market getting 3%, then after tax having 1.5%. With currency losing 7% of its value a year, you're losing 5 or 6% of your wealth every year for your life. Bitcoin is compelling because the average person shouldn't have to be a real estate expert, tax expert, or capable of launching their own restaurant, bar, or bakery. They shouldn't have to be a stock picker. The typical person should be able to take their money, put it into an asset which appreciates in value 15% a year, and not have to worry about it.
John Bogle's real contribution and the success of the S&P 500 is recognizing that currency is not a store of value. Real estate is illiquid, scary, difficult, inefficient, and high maintenance. The liquid capital asset is SPY, the S&P 500 in ETF form. This has returned 15% over the past 6 years, over a 100 years maybe 10% something like that every year.
If the US dollar is losing 7% of its value in scarce desirable terms over the course of 100 years and you're getting 10%, you're getting a 2 or 3% boost in return for accepting the volatility of being invested in the stock market. It's the conventional best idea to preserve your wealth without taking on individual corporate risk and individual real estate risk.
Gold is up 12% a year for the past six years. The S&P is up 15%, gold's up 12%, the NASDAQ's up 18%, Bitcoin is up 33%. Gold, S&P, diversified tech stocks, and Bitcoin are all winners when looking at capital assets.
If you're living in Turkey, Argentina, Brazil before the currency collapses, Mexico, Venezuela, or any country in Africa, you don't get gold, you don't get the S&P, you don't get QQQ, you can't buy diversified real estate in the US. Those options are Western world conventional capital assets.
The big mistake is investing in non-capital assets. Don't put all your family's money in soybeans. Don't buy barrels of crude oil. Don't buy cotton. Don't invest in things that a factory or robot or AI can generate infinite of. Buy things that robots, AIs, and big factories cannot pump out by the million gallons. This includes an ounce of gold, a share in the 500 most desirable companies in the world, or one out of 21 million Bitcoin. All of those things are things that robots are not going to create infinite of.
Which capital asset is a function of where you live and what your mindset is. If you're living in a war zone, Bitcoin is advised because you're not carrying it through a checkpoint. If you need to go through an airport, you want something that you get to keep and take with you.
The surge in robotics and artificial intelligence that's going to empower them to be very intelligent has changed the thesis and view of the future. Technology fails until it succeeds. When at MIT, people were trying to make speech recognition work but it just didn't work. For a thousand years people wanted to fly and it didn't work. In 1902, the New York Times declared that every learned scientist knows you'll never be able to fly, and then in 1903 we fly. In 2023, AI started working.
We've affected the digital transformation of intelligence. Cars are going to drive themselves. Anything that takes massive human labor, whether it's lawyering, writing a contract, composing a poem, script, or book, can be done by AI. You tell the AI what kind of book you want, the setting, protagonists, and it creates it.
Voltaire was impressive because he created literature that came out of the mind of one man. We're always going to admire the people that did it first, but AIs will think for us. Put the AI into the robot and you can imagine a billion robots. You might pay $200 a month for a robot that does everything - cook, clean, take out the trash. Self-driving cars are safer than person-driven cars.
The irony is that if you want to prove a message came from you, you have to actually put errors in it because the AI can draft things as though it had a PhD in English and 20 years experience as a copy editor. We're reaching the point where lack of effectiveness is just laziness. The AI creates perfect documents and does perfect research. The robots will do any amount of work.
We're about to trip over an age of abundance. Elon Musk says in a future where anyone can have anything, you no longer need money as a database for labor allocation. If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then the relevance of money declines rapidly. In a benign scenario, we'll have universal high income, not just universal basic income, meaning anyone can have any products or any services they want. Universal high income via checks issued by federal governments is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI and robotics because AI and robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in money supply, so there will be no inflation. Work will become optional, like playing sports or a video game.
AI and robotics are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for humans. Money is fundamentally information. The true constraints of the future won't be financial, they'll be energy and mass.
Consumer goods, consumables, and utilitarian goods will become abundant, but there are always going to be scarce desirable goods that will not become abundant. Money will still be valuable. Wealth will still be valuable.
Henry VII didn't have clean water, heat, or cooling. Technology gave all these things to the middle class. If you live in the middle class today, you can have your appendix out, but Henry VII didn't have dental crowns or x-rays. Modern medical care, plunging infant mortality rates, safer life, clean water, clean air, clean food, and technology gave them to us.
We stamp out infinite Coca-Cola, infinite Hershey's bars, ice cream, running water, and electricity. All of those things have been given to the middle class and working class in the developed world. But everybody doesn't get a Hamptons house, their own private jet, or their own private yacht.
With the explosion of affluence comes massive utilitarian entitlement. Lots of cars, but how many people get a Porsche? What happens with humanity is we always invent the luxury car and come up with the trophy asset. Most people don't actually want that. They want to be able to feed their family and not have to worry about the bills.
If your aspiration is a good life, if you want infinite food, infinite energy, infinite education, infinite entertainment, you're probably going to get it. The point is that everybody has electricity and water because people want to buy something more than water. Water is the proletarian drink - if you go to a restaurant and can't afford anything else, you ask for a cup of water. If you have more money, you get Coca-Cola or a soft drink for five bucks. With more money, you buy vodka. Then when you have more money, you want specialty high-end tequila. Eventually people find a way to spend $38 on a drink. In New York City, you can see that everywhere.
Why do we go to restaurants and pay $300 to eat at a restaurant when you can feed yourself on three bucks a day? The answer is there's always going to be a hierarchy of affluence and people are going to find things to aspire to that will be more than the utilitarian mean that everybody gets. If everybody gets universal healthcare, people want private healthcare. If everybody gets a house, someone's going to want a house twice as
Money will not disappear because humans are status-oriented animals who always want something more exclusive. Even basic needs like housing, transportation, energy, and healthcare can be manufactured in quantity and become progressively cheaper as consumer goods. There will always be exclusivity and quests for better options, such as finding the perfect skiing conditions on uncrowded mountain peaks.
If knowledge work becomes automated by robots and AI, new jobs may not be created quickly enough to meet demand for professional work. Historical examples show that new professions emerge over time - podcasters, Instagram influencers who make a living posting makeup and fashion content, accountants, lawyers, and film producers did not exist in their current forms decades ago. However, this transition will cause dislocation and political unrest.
A progressive society is defined as one where individuals are allowed to start businesses and sell products without the restrictions seen in Cuba or North Korea. Lawyers have attempted to block autonomous vehicles because they profit from litigating car accidents. Similarly, regulations prevent Airbnb despite modern technology. The solution is to embrace technology for maximum productivity while minimizing disruption through greater degrees of freedom, allowing new businesses to emerge that create value and employment.
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Consistency compounds in sales, but breaks down as teams grow. Pipe Drive is an intelligent CRM tool that provides visibility of every deal at every pipeline stage and shows what needs to happen for deals to progress. Over 100,000 companies use it. An exclusive 30-day free trial is available at piperive.com/ceo.
Instead of asking AI to write a book, users can ask what book they should read based on their specific context. The AI can then create a customized 20-page book in the preferred author's style, formatted as an MP3 for a 43-minute commute. The key constraint is defining the input state space - a baker in Lagos, Nigeria faces different conditions than a fireman in Los Angeles.
In 2025, after maxing out equity markets and becoming the world's largest convertible bond issuer with $30 billion in Bitcoin holdings, a new security was needed to raise additional capital. AI was used to design STRK, a convertible preferred stock backed by Bitcoin - the first of its kind. Traditional lawyers and bankers initially rejected the concept because no one had done it before.
The goal was creating a short-duration credit instrument trading stably around $100 par value. This required a variable dividend rate that could change monthly - never done before in preferred stock history. ChatGPT confirmed it was legally possible and provided implementation guidance. The IPO raised $2.5 billion as the year's biggest IPO, followed by an additional $8 billion through shelf registration, totaling $10.5 billion plus $4 billion from other instruments.
Only 2% of households have ChatGPT or AI subscriptions, creating an arbitrage opportunity. Entrepreneurs should become adept at using multiple AIs as basic tools alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. The objective is creating something magical - for example, accounting software that replaces a million accountants' work for $10 monthly.
Students should study technologies on the rising S-curve rather than those hitting diminishing returns. Historical examples include flight technology, which advanced rapidly from 1903 until the mid-1970s when the 737 and 747 were designed, then stagnated with only 15% efficiency gains over 50 years. Semiconductors and computer science remain on an active S-curve with continued breakthroughs.
Smart glasses represent the next form factor after smartphones hit diminishing returns. These glasses would weigh nothing, contain cameras, understand context, and connect to AI for real-time information. Meta is developing a wrist strap device that connects to glasses, allowing users to see screens and interact with content through peripheral vision. Neuralink represents a potential future where AI interaction happens through implants.
Study digital intelligence, digital assets, and technologies that create magic things parents would consider impossible. Avoid studying professions AI can perform - surgeons, lawyers, accountants, and drivers face automation risks. Focus on asking AI to do things never done before rather than learning tasks AI already handles.
The actionable step is learning about digital systems and platforms. Content creators should study digital channels rather than traditional stage acting. MrBeast demonstrates the scale possible - 100 million subscribers versus the smaller audiences of traditional Broadway actors. Digital platforms include X, Instagram, YouTube, and digital intelligence tools.
Frontier models can produce video, content, and pictures, potentially creating a supply shock with agents posting 100 videos across platforms while creators sleep. Demand for attention appears relatively fixed, with younger people slightly reducing online time. Major podcasters have seen 50% declines in views over 12-24 months. The solution involves enhancing content rather than avoiding the space entirely.
The moat in content creation will be the most talented content, the person creating the best stuff that everybody wants to see. There are videos being created like a walkthrough of a 16th century warship where someone constructs the entire warship from the keel, creates the ribs, shows the lower deck and ballast, and takes you through every step in a three-dimensional video animation that takes about an hour. This content is riveting despite having no reason to care about 16th century warships because it's fascinating to see the explanation.
Creativity remains the moat, or understanding what humans want and then delivering it. Within 10 years of whenever there's a new technology platform, some geniuses push it to the limit and do 95% of everything that can be done, and it all happens within 10 years and they live forever.
The piano comes out and some genius does stuff with the piano. Between Beethoven and Chopin and a few players, it's not clear if humans try for another 10,000 years, they'll do much better. With Led Zeppelin, electric guitars and amplification clicked in the late 60s. The sound of the early 60s was not quite there, and by 1971-72 you could do some amazing stuff. All the classic rock between 1970 and 1980 represents human creativity pushing the edge of the envelope, then you hit diminishing returns.
Along comes sampling and you get Swedish House Mafia and Avicii as new technology. Then YouTube comes along and Justin Bieber comes out of nowhere, Mr. Beast comes out of nowhere, and they push it to the extreme. With every generation, a new thing is given whether it's a piano or electric guitar or internet.
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg did what he did at just about the point when you could do that with the web. Early mobile apps like WhatsApp followed the same pattern. The goal is to locate the magic opportunity right at the right point on the S-curve where it just now became commercially viable and it's a zero to one moment.
The company went from nothing to $60 billion or from 1 billion to 60 billion by being the first company to take digital capital Bitcoin and put it together with digital credit and a digital treasury model. They created a credit instrument, a security that could never be created before, or couldn't have been made 10 years ago. It couldn't be built on top of anything other than Bitcoin.
They needed to get to the point where they had 10 or 20 billion dollars of capital, then they could create this thing that was a multi-billion dollar thing that becomes resonant. That window is like 12 to 24 months, and going through that window creates something that might be a hundred billion dollar thing. If you went through 36 months early, you smack into a wall and fail.
The company is now 20 times bigger than the next biggest one, 50 times bigger than the company doing something similar. They didn't plan it. They found some extraordinary cool thing, committed to it with all their heart and soul, and declared they were going to make it work come hell or high water. They got punched in the face a hundred times. Every single time they ran into a problem, they stopped, recalibrated, went a different direction.
The process creates something beautiful like everybody wants a bank account that pays 10%. If you can figure out how to give people this thing they want with new technology that was impossible that did not exist 5 years or 3 years earlier, then you resonate in society. You go viral because you were just the first ones to get there.
A billion dollars spent on marketing wouldn't be as effective. You couldn't buy the success with a billion dollars of marketing. The Led Zeppelin guys didn't spend a billion dollars marketing. You have to be in the right place, the right time, and have the courage to offer people the new thing.
Michael Jackson was at a level of fame that's not been seen since. Part of the reason was because there was a constraint on distribution channels back then. In one house there were 20 albums and Michael Jackson was like three of them. The other way to consume was TV with six channels and MTV was one of them with Michael Jackson all day.
In the current world, phone experience is completely different from person to person because of AI learning what someone likes and showing their own little version of the world. The question is whether it's possible to be as big as Michael Jackson once was. Fame or being a content creator or musician once looked like a high ceiling where you're known for a hundred years like Michael Jackson, but with personalized algorithms, it might now look shorter and shallower.
Going viral is about hitting a resonating frequency in civilization, whether it's an artistic frequency, political frequency, or technical frequency. There are some things where there's going to be a glut. On Instagram, a billion people have bad photos posted online, but there are people that manage to get 8 million followers like the Kardashians.
There is room for human creativity and innovation. If the goal is to make a contribution during working years to upgrade the world and make a difference and be remembered for something, the principle is don't keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year, fighting against the modern automation epidemic. Don't try to outwork the robots.
Technology has given the ability to amplify intellect and amplify creativity in a way that's unprecedented in human history. It used to be you would go be a college professor and teach 200 students a year for 20 years and feel your life contribution was 4,000 people whose minds you touched, and now you get 4,000 people a second.
Technology said you can reach more people through TV, radio, all these things, and now with intelligence it's saying we can figure out exactly what someone likes, so people are starting to live in smaller echo chambers where creative ideas or content reaching lots of people is going to become harder because algorithms are deciding who sees what and they're optimizing for the platform's monetary desire.
That which is really hard and scarce are the same thing because to create something scarce is also hard. Very few people on earth could have created the financial instrument. People don't run public companies, don't have the information, etc. The YouTuber who walks through 16th century warships creates something very hard to do.
Pursuing that which is hard and scarce becomes the moat. Getting someone to come for an interview is not easy, so that's kind of the moat. Michelle Obama coming and sitting down creates a moat. The theory of pursuing hard and scarce things is agreed with.
The right thing to do is spend intense time with AI considering all the ways to upgrade and improve the product or service created. It used to be you do this in English, and the issue is what about Japanese or Chinese or French. The hard way is you learn 20 languages, but now AI can translate into 100 languages right now. The question is whether you should or not.
Can you enhance content with AI or better market or distribute content with AI? The next step is can you market it better or distribute it better? The next step is whether you're creating something that'll be valuable in a decade, or will it be valuable in a hundred years.
24 months ago, the experiment started of offering Arabic translation. The question is how many people that do podcast interviews offer that level of quality of content. Nobody else has done it. It started almost 3 years ago, and for the first 24 months it was a tragic failure. The data scientists were failing for 24 months, then about 12 months ago for the first time the translation technology improved and view duration in Spanish could be higher than English.
Jimmy Page spent more than 24 months trying to master the electric guitar. The advice to an entrepreneur is to focus and commit. If you're successful in less than four years, you got lucky. Between four and 10 years is very normal. If you haven't had success by the 10-year point, you're probably not cut out for the business.
AI is going to remake the industry. The first issue is can you make the product better? The second question is what's it worth? Even if you didn't get paid, the argument is that the audience has limited attention span. There's no time to listen to every Lex Fridman, every Joe Rogan, every Diary of the CEO, and every one of the next 20. Loyalty becomes a customer and fan of whoever serves the best content. If someone is a native Portuguese speaker or native Russian speaker, being first to offer that content leaps right to the top.
People in Portugal maybe have never heard Michael Saylor before in Portuguese. In terms of scarce, it's actually the only interview now available that's 2 hours long of Michael Saylor talking in Cantonese. That's the moat. The distribution channel sends the message of digital capital and digital empowerment to the world, and guests become the moat.
With every single business, the question must be asked: is technology going to cannibalize the business or disrupt it, and will you be the one that embraces it and evolves and grows with it or fights it? If you've done it, you can look and see how it runs and whether YouTube actually expands reach, then look at engagement and figure out whether you're able to monetize that and convert that, then tweak it and adjust. Being 12 months ahead of everybody else compounds over time, and maybe they never catch up.
The story of every business is the story of Ford Motor Company, Standard Oil, Microsoft, Facebook. Focus, commit, and if you're good enough, customers will make you the winner. The world needs someone to do what you do. Someone has to win. The audience wants what you do. They want to walk into the living room and figure out what Obama was thinking or what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking, and they want someone to bring them into that living room. They want you to host them in.
You don't have to be perfect or better than anybody ever lived. You need to be better than the people that are currently doing it now, or one of a handful of people doing it. At that point, the audience comes to you, the guests come to you. You're making a market. You're the market maker in that information.
The real key is knowing what your value proposition is. Stay in your lane. Don't try to compete in an area where you're not going to be the best in the world. Anybody can have the best in the world in like two seconds at their fingertips. You don't want to be the third best. You don't want to be mediocre across a bunch of things. You want to be exceptional in one area. Figure out what that one area is. Then maybe you have two million followers, then 200 million followers, then eventually over 100 years, two billion.
One thing that comes with the pursuit of being first is going over the hill and taking the arrows. In the translation experiment started 3 years ago, Spanish words are longer so the video in Spanish is 3 hours 10 minutes but in English it's 3 hours. Cantonese words require translating all thumbnails and titles in 20 languages at the same time. That's why you end up three years in when you thought it was just a one hour job.
There's a graveyard of other things tried that never worked. The other 90% of experiments run in the corner did nothing. There are two things a year that define the team. In the failure and experimentation team, 60 things were tried, but five of them mattered, two of them game-changing. The attitude of dealing with failure at the very forefront of trying to be first is something people don't talk about enough.
Focus your energy, guard your time. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do the thing. Most of the time, the reason people fail is they get successful in their 30s and they're successful at one thing and all of a sudden they've decided they're going to do 10 other things because they're good at everything and they dilute their focus in 10 ways.
People always underestimate the maintenance obligation. The right solution to growth is making whatever is being done twice as good. If 10 things are done to make it 10% better, that dilutes and distracts the phenomena that causes most businesses to fail. Dilutive distractions or dilutive expansions happen when people do one thing that works, and instead of turning their energy into making that better and better, they start to bifurcate and trifurcate and expand and overreach to too many areas.
The dude with the great restaurant gets the second restaurant, then a chain of 37 restaurants, and they all suck. There's no one with a failed restaurant chain that wasn't a successful restaurant at scale one. The conundrum is wanting to grow and progress but not dilute and distract. That requires maturity of saying you tried it, had a moderate success, but it's not enough, kill it and move on because it's just not going to work.
Young people come up 9 months into their idea and they're not rich yet, so they look over and see their friend started a thing with CBD, and their careers look like swinging through the jungle, grabbing onto the next branch and letting go of the last and never really making upward motion towards any goal.
Taking a long-term approach to things means making foundational decisions today that create huge competitive advantages. If given 10 seconds to make the highest possible tower, the approach would be quick and unstable. If given 10 years and infinite blocks, the approach would start with a foundation and build something more stable.
Elon went and rebuilt a brand new battery, built the charging network, and SpaceX took two decades. Elon thinks like an engineer, and his businesses are all built upon each other. If you figure out how to launch a rocket and have the highest payload capacity and cheapest cost to orbit, then you have an advantage. The question is what to put in orbit. Satellites were put in orbit, but Starlink satellites because that's the thing everybody wants internet. All of a sudden there's an advantage in the sky, and then you build on that advantage with battery technology.
A natural example is the chambered Nautilus building a shell and spiraling out on itself, basically keeping building on its own structure. It's nature's solution for growth under pressure. It's the Fibonacci sequence too. If the next structure builds on the previous business as the foundation for the next business, that's natural stable growth.
When the second business idea is unrelated to the first business in any way other than owning both, you're not building on a stable foundation. Most businesses that work start with someone dominating a market. Mark Zuckerberg dominated a market, and then the natural thing to add uses the existing business. Coca-Cola delivers a pallet of drinks to 87,000 restaurants in the UK every morning, and the natural extension is putting one more type of drink on the pallet.
Distribution strength, market strength, technical strength need to be used to lever. All the great businesses in history against Standard Oil, Ford Motor, Boeing, Microsoft, the things that worked were generally building on top of their foundation, either loyal customers or distribution or some financial asset they already had.
If there's no one else in the world that is better situated to do this thing than you, then you're probably in good shape. If there are 97 other companies that have more assets than you in that space, you have to bet that all 97 of them are not going to react when you do it, and that's harder. That's where long-termism comes in because building that fundamental advantage by definition is going to take time.
Amazon Prime is a good example where Amazon started giving free shipping, first free shipping or very cheap shipping and one day shipping. Everybody said they were losing money. They lost money doing this for like a decade, and then they got to some point where
Amazon reached a point where everyone in the country became a member of Amazon Prime. When they raised the price from $10 to $20 a month, this generated an additional $10 per month times 100 million people, creating $12 billion in annual cash flow from a single press release. This valuation added $250 billion to Amazon's market value. This story illustrates the pattern of first building the largest distribution channel possible before monetizing it.
The speaker discussed 10 rules for young adults building strong foundations for their life and career. Two rules had already been covered: focusing your energy and not chasing every good idea, plus guarding your time.
Train your mind and train your body comprise the next rules. The speaker recounted being invited to a cocktail party on the French Riviera by a billionaire who asked for advice for his newborn twins to be given on their 21st birthday. The speaker wrote advice in the billionaire's book collecting guidance from friends.
The speaker outlined these foundational rules:
- Focus your mind and learn reading, writing, arithmetic while developing a cultured base through education
- Train your body, as weakness prevents survival
- Think for yourself, resisting programming from others regardless of their status
- Curate your friends, surrounding yourself with positive, inspirational, talented people
- Curate your environment to create happy places to work and live
- Keep your promises, as people remember when you don't
- Stay cheerful and constructive, as people want relationships with such individuals
- Upgrade the world with a mission that gives purpose
Satoshi created economic property and gave economic empowerment to 8 billion people for the first time in human history. The speaker described creating the world's first perfect money: digital energy, digital matter, and digital property. Technology enables humans to be a thousand times more capable than before. Throughout human history, people died from lack of clean water, clean air, clean food, and clean money.
The speaker wants to live as long as possible constructively and make a contribution, but would move on gracefully when no longer able to contribute. Regarding immortality, the speaker would press a button guaranteeing it if possible, but believes there are 8 billion people on the planet and many more qualified individuals pursuing longevity research than himself.
The speaker has been a consistent Bitcoin advocate over many years, serving as a mental framework for investors during price downturns. Bitcoin was down at the time of the conversation, with people claiming it was a Ponzi scheme that was finished. The speaker has taken on significant debt to buy more Bitcoin.
The company has approximately $6.5 billion in convertible debt and $15 billion in preferred stocks outstanding, sitting on $58 billion in assets. They have raised about $65 billion in capital to buy Bitcoin, with most coming through debt. The goal was to pump $65 billion of capital into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Even if Bitcoin fell to $5,000 per coin, the company would still be over-collateralized against its debt. The speaker noted that Satoshi is the only entity that has never sold more Bitcoin than MicroStrategy, which holds 847,000 Bitcoin and is the largest buyer in the world.
The company sold some Bitcoin weeks earlier because the market believed the company had become so systemically important that it could never sell without crashing Bitcoin and the company's stock. Short sellers took the position that the $55 billion in Bitcoin was worth nothing. The market claimed the company couldn't sell Bitcoin without crashing it, creating a "doom loop" where the credit and equity would go to zero.
The company sold Bitcoin at $59,000, and the price traded up afterward, breaking the narrative that selling would crash Bitcoin. The break-even point is about 3.2% appreciation, meaning Bitcoin needs only to rise 3.2% for the company to pay dividends forever by selling Bitcoin. This demonstrated that the credit is good and can be funded with Bitcoin sales rather than equity sales.
The primary strategy is to sell equity when common stock trades at a premium to underlying assets, but sell Bitcoin when common stock trades at a discount to protect equity holders. The speaker believes Bitcoin will appreciate about 30% a year for the next 20 years, then slow to 20% annually, outperforming the S&P index by a factor of 1.5 to 2.
The appropriate investors are long-term capital investors with money they don't need for the next four years, ideally 10 years. Bitcoin maximums who spend 100 hours studying it would buy a lot, while uncertain investors should diversify across real estate, equity, other long-term assets, and Bitcoin. People needing money back in 12 weeks should not buy Bitcoin.
For a 25-year-old with a few hundred dollars to invest, Bitcoin would provide double the performance of the S&P index. The speaker recommends spending $20-200 monthly on AI subscriptions like Grok Pro or professional editions rather than expensive university education. Digital capital allows portability worldwide, unlike real estate which locks investors into specific cities with high maintenance and risk.
The closing tradition question left for the speaker: "What is one thing you believe that maybe you haven't talked about enough that you think likely 99% of the world don't yet believe?"
The speaker studied practical applied statistics independently after college, reading works by Nicholas Taleb including "Fooled by Randomness," "Skin in the Game," and "The Black Swan." These taught how to distinguish meaningful information from misleading random data. The AI cannot provide real-time common sense for daily decisions like crossing the street while typing on a phone.
The speaker read Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization" - 11 volumes, 14,000 pages covering art, culture, politics, technology, and military history. Most school history is summarized and censored. Reading complete histories as adults provides profound appreciation for humanity and wisdom, showing that most things people think are new have been discovered and rediscovered throughout history.
Every currency throughout history has been debased, not just after Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971. People think they learned everything in college, but it's never too late to relearn math, especially applied statistics, and history. Adult learners appreciate these subjects better with life experience, overcoming the arrogance of thinking they are the first to encounter any issue.
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