Michael Saylor, the outspoken executive chairman and co-founder of business intelligence company MicroStrategy, recently sounded off on the virtues of Bitcoin — including claiming it’ll reach $10 million per coin and that the entire nation of China will get behind the cryptocurrency — in an 84-minute podcast interview.
Economic pseudoscience
In the above video’s intro, bites of Saylor making the bodacious price claim, “the cost of Bitcoin’s going to go up to ten million dollars a coin,” flash alongside quotes given in the entrepreneur’s typical bombast:
“What’s the difference between perfect money and imperfect money? Perfect money is economic immortality. Imperfect money is: we all have a short, brutal life.”
The main takeaway, aside from Saylor’s apparent belief that Bitcoin is the future of money, is that Bitcoin serves society as a sort of corporate immortality machine.
Saylor framed this idea with the question: “what if I told you I could make your company live forever?”
According to him, everything that’s come before Bitcoin, economically speaking, has been made obsolete with its introduction:
“Economics is pseudoscience before Satoshi. It’s a quasi-religious liberal art and it’s full of people’s opinions and prejudices and biases. … All the economists before Satoshi were trying to work out the laws of economics with seashells and glass beads and pieces of paper and credit instruments.”
Corporate immortality
Ultimately, Saylor’s point revolved around the idea that companies that invest in Bitcoin are positioned to last longer than those that remain mired in the corporate malaise of old.
Per Saylor:
“The average life expectancy of a corporation is something like 10 years. … We’re talking about eliminating corporate mortality, we’re talking about stretching economic vitality easily by a factor of 10, maybe by a factor of a hundred, maybe by a factor of a million."
As to exactly how this would work, Saylor appears to have that figured out as well. Aside from directly stating that he believed the Chinese people and government would embrace Bitcoin, he gave his prediction that, sometime in the future, a single Bitcoin will be worth $10 million.
Related: MicroStrategy completes $800M note offering to buy more Bitcoin