MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor says crypto traders who are skeptical of his commitment to Bitcoin are sorely mistaken.
In a new interview with Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal, Saylor says he’s so bullish on BTC’s power to serve as the ultimate treasury asset, he can’t believe there are people willing to sell it to him.
“Who are these people that are selling it to me? I can’t believe someone is willing to sell it to me. But I’m thanking my lucky stars. I’m like, hit me again, hit me again, hit me again.”
Since announcing his firm’s investment, Saylor says crypto advocates and investors have implied he has weak hands – but nothing could be further from the truth.
“I see these guys on crypto Twitter. And they’re like, ‘Ya, Saylor’s going to buy it and he’s going to dump it. He’s going to buy it and then buy another company with it. He’s going to buy it until he gets this profit and do whatever.’
There’s a lot of traders in the market. They don’t understand the mindset of long. I’m buying it for the dude that’s going to work for the dude that’s going to get hired by the guy who takes over my job in 100 years. I’m not selling it. When it goes up by a factor of 100, I might be borrowing a little to go buy something that I want, but what am I going to buy with it that’s better than what I’m buying?
Every other treasury asset, and I count $250 trillion worth of stuff – gold, fixed income, sovereign debt, cash equivalents, every other treasury asset’s got a negative real yield. What am I going to buy with it? There’s no other asset to buy with it.”
Saylor says Bitcoin is a far better asset for the long term hold than gold because not only is it more liquid than the precious metal, but its price is independent of how many people enter into the space.
“When the price of gold goes to $50,000 an ounce and hundreds of billions of dollars get invested in gold mining, they’re going to double the production or triple the production of gold. They’re going to drive the price down, but the variable cost of producing gold is going to be $2000 an ounce. The price is going to be $50,000 an ounce. The price of gold is going to get driven into the dirt.”
This has happened many times in the past hundred years, says Saylor, highlighting the price of oil during the fracking explosion as a prime example.
“We produced five million barrels of oil in this country a day and everybody said ‘Oh my god the price of oil is going to $100 a barrel.’
It’s a crisis. We fought wars over this. We fought wars in order to go protect our oil interests because we thought the western world was going to be choked to death if we didn’t have access to cheap oil from Saudi Arabia.
So what happened? The price of oil went up. When it got to $100 a barrel, you know what happened? Big banks, the big, the big famous bulge bracket banks, they would form conferences and they would bring high net worth individuals together and they would say ‘You know there’s an opportunity to invest billions of dollars in these new fracking operations and they can produce oil for $45 a barrel or $30 a barrel and the price is $100 a barrel and we can sell it for $70 or $80 or $90 a barrel.’
Saylor also credits Bitcoin for being more liquid than gold.
“You can move liquid capital from Amazon to Apple to Bitcoin. You can’t move gold mining capital. It only does one thing, which means that I am locked like my knees buried up at the concrete, and all I know how to do is I know how to make more gold.