Michael Saylor:  How did I get in to Bitcoin? I had a company with 500 million dollars in Cash earning 0% interest. I heard the bankers say what I have been thinking about raising interest rates.  I saw a K-shaped recovery where everybody on Wall Street got 30% doing nothing whereas everybody on main street had to work 30% harder to stay still. That is what I saw last year.

You are in Wall Street with a billion dollars – with a billion three.  If you are on the Main Street working for living and selling something by the sweat of your brow you had to raise your prices by 30% working harder in order to generate 30% more money to buy the same thing you could have bought before the crisis.

What I saw was 2000 people in my company working hard doing 100,000 things right every year could make 50 million dollars. And, the money in the bank was going to lose a 100 million dollars a year in value doing nothing. And, we were running as hard as we could and going backwards.

That is the problem.  It is like you are in a boat you are a row boat and you are going to cross the water and the wind starts blowing in your face. And now you are getting blown backwards. You are going to row harder the wind is the monetary inflation rate. At 10% when it is hard and then 20% when it is harder and who can grow their cash flow at 25% a year? Who could do it? A monopoly.

A digital tech monopoly might, but nobody else can – Dentists can’t, doctors can’t, normal people can’t, normal company can’t.  So, the wind starts blowing double and triple on your face you are not going to get across and you are going to die down the row boat.

So, what are you going to do? Turn the boat around – put up a sail and sail with the wind. That is what I did.  So, let me give you that economic short story here.

The company is worth a billion dollars. This is Microstrategy.  We have got a 500 millions dollar software company that generates 50, 75, 90 million dollars a year in cash flow. We have 500 million dollars in the bank. We are valued at one time revenue plus the cash.  And the cash is going to lose 20 to 30% of its value. So, I am looking at losing a 100 million dollars a year. Sitting there doing nothing.

Well, so what do I do? So, well I am going to buy something. So, I went and I bought bitcoin. I bought 250 million dollars’ worth of it. And, then I offered to buy back 250 million dollars in my stock, because my share holders did not like the idea, I figured how to buy them out at a premium.  After the buy back I had 175 million dollars left, I bought more Bitcoin. We bought 425 million dollars of Bitcoin. When I started this journey, the stock was at 120 dollars a share. We bought out our limited partners – we bought out our share holders at 140 dollars a share they didn’t like the idea. The stock traded up; Bitcoin traded up. We doubled our initial investment the stock kept going up and then I looked then I said, I am just going to borrowed money and then I went and borrowed 650 million dollars. At 75 basis points in the capital market, I issued a convertible bond, I bought the bitcoin – 19,000 – the stock kept trading up; Bitcoin kept trading up – we made billions at that point.  I went back to the market.  I bought a billion dollars at 0% interest, because why wouldn’t you.

If the money supply is expanding at 25% a year and you can borrow money at 0% interest all you got to do is to buy something which is scarce, right? So, bought a billion dollars of Bitcoin.  I issued a billion dollars of bond. To make a long story short – we ended up borrowing 2.2 dollars at 1.5% and we bought the bitcoin and Bitcoin has hit an all time high. We now have 7.5 billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. We have made a 4 billion dollars investment profit on it. The stock went from 120 to 850 – we generated about 8 billion dollars in share holder value in 12 months.

So, now where are we? We are a 500 million dollar software company generating may be 80 to 100 million in cash flow growing 0 to 10% a year with a 7.5 to 8 billion dollar endowment that is growing a 170% a year. It is like why not?

So, if you are a university you are an endowment and now we can do what we want.