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Adam Livingston
@AdamBLiv
The Bitcoin Wizard | Vice President, Investments @Strive Christ. Family. Bitcoin. In that order.
Joined January 2025
299 Following    89K Followers
I was in the right place at the right time, and lived the right life experiences to fully ingest the Saylor pill in 2024. MicroStrategy buying Bitcoin in 2020 was an act of capital allocation, and a bold one at that. It will always seem more obvious as time goes on and as Bitcoin adoption continues to proliferate, but at the time it was a profound statement on the rational way to act during the age of fiat debasement. But before capital is misallocated, human attention is misallocated, and that is the fundamental experience that allowed the Bitcoin/MSTR combo to hit me like a ton of philosophical bricks. I was lucky enough to find Bitcoin during the prior decade, but I was even luckier when I worked in an unglamorous industry, where an almost unfathomable number of human hours and attention are spent to eek out additional basis points of profit. A corporation might spend thousands upon thousands of employee hours reducing unit costs by 15 basis points, negotiating supplier contracts and optimizing labor schedules, improving inventory turnover, etc... And in addition to that, a company will take out $40 million of debt to finance the build out a brick-and-mortar store in knife fight of a market, knowing it can take 10-15 years just to get the store to print a green quarterly P&L, let alone paying off the debt and ending up at breakeven before two decades pass by. I worked 100-hour weeks and sacrificed all my freedom in my early 20's. My schedule changed whenever the business demanded it. And it's funny because eventually I started noticing something peculiar. During the input process to acquire the cash flow, every penny gets scrutinized. Then the output process. Scrutinized? Hardly. The resulting profits accumulate on the balance sheet, and remarkably little intellectual labor goes to asking what that capital should own, how its purchasing power should be preserved, or even what risks the company is assuming by doing nothing. I spent my adult life fighting the entropy of the debasement age in a business that optimizes the production of capital while totally neglecting the stewardship of capital after it's produced. And then I heard about a man who was borrowing billions in fiat at near 0% rates to buy Bitcoin. Arguing against the mispriced risks everywhere honestly isn't even necessarily a matter of criticizing an investment decision. The real issue at hand is that there are entire industries with a total absence of a serious decision-making process. Consider a hypothetical company with $100 million in treasury assets. A 1% annual difference in risk-adjusted returns represents $1 million. That's potentially more consequential than hundreds of operational improvements that receive orders of magnitude more of management attention. There is an underlying economic principle that is blatantly ignored by many in this world, that attention itself is a scarce form of capital, and companies often fail to allocate enough of it to deciding how financial capital should be allocated. This creates two layers of potential inefficiency, because first you have the opportunity cost of an inferior capital decision... ...but then you have the opportunity cost of never investing the time and labor required to discover a superior decision. And that second cost is particularly insidious because it doesn't appear in accounting reports. Unfortunately, nobody books an expense for a capital allocation thesis that was never investigated. There is too much intellectual horsepower devoted to microscopic operational decisions. Corporations will spend a million dollars figuring out how to save a penny, then spend virtually nothing figuring out what to do with the dollars they saved. Another interesting thing I've noticed is how corporations have extensive processes for auditing how employees spend money. But at the same time they often devote far less comparable analytical effort to examining how the money they retain should be held over time. Holding dollars is an economic choice with assumptions about inflation, interest rates, liquidity, and opportunity cost. But the greatest inefficiency is always made before an investing decision is made, which is the decision to treat capital stewardship as something that doesn't deserve serious intellectual attention. I admired Saylor for being willing to question an assumption that thousands of corporations continue to treat as settled. And I don't expect every corporation to arrive as his same answer. But I do expect the question to deserve the same rigor we devote to earning money in the first place. The greatest waste of human labor is earning capital that nobody ever bothered to think seriously about preserving.
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