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Over the last 12 months, Strategy's been extremely successful at building the capital base and expanding the balance sheet using primarily equity in the IPOs from the preferred markets. And over that 12 months, you saw MSTR underperform Bitcoin in a fairly significant manner. Do you guys view the strategic priorities moving forward as focusing more on increasing amplification and less on expanding the balance sheet? And how has this past year informed your go forward strategy and how you might prioritize the press over the common equity moving forward? Thank you.
Yeah, that's an open-ended question. So, I'll start and then Vong or Andrew may have something to add. Yeah, clearly uh with equity, if you I would say if you're going to own Bitcoin, you need a four-year or longer time horizon. If you're going to own amplified Bitcoin, a company that aims to be more volatile than Bitcoin, you can't have a lower time horizon. So, you probably need a longer time horizon. So we we managed the company such that we think 10 years from now we're going to create an insane amount of shareholder value. And and that doesn't mean we're looking for 10-year payoff. We're generally thinking if it doesn't return what we expected within four years, we'd be very disappointed. But we never do anything where we where we demand to get the payback in four months. And so we don't have a four-month time horizon or even a year time horizon. And and uh we think that generally I would say if your time horizon is 12 weeks, you should own the STRC, right? You really should go to the short end of the risk curve and the short end of the duration curve because that one we're trying to strip volatility away. And if your time horizon is 10 years and if you're a Bitcoin maxi then maybe you like the equity or you like Bitcoin.
Um, the credit instruments I would say if we wanted to raise the max amount of capital then we could do two things that we don't do. One thing we could do is we could just open up the ATM and we could sell stock at any mnav any week all the time. And what you've seen is we don't do that. You know, I uh after the red sweep when there was when there was a massive enthusiasm, we would sell a billion or two or three billion dollars of stock like a billion in a week or two billion in a week. And so you see, we're not shy when the market is strong and and uh the premiums are high. We would go very hard, but you see a lot of weeks where we sell nothing and we c we could have sold a billion dollars of equity a week. We chose not to sell any equity. If the equity is weak and it's crashing, it's almost certain, in fact, it is certain we're not the ones doing it, right? We're watching, right? Because our view is we only sell into strength and we only sell into strength when we like the premium. So, so we have actively decided we don't want uh to maximize capital by selling equity.
And then I think the other thing is just like we could raise a billion dollars of equity in a few days if we wanted to. I could also pick up the phone and I could raise a billion dollars overnight in debt. If I just said we wanted to do a pipe deal with a debt investor, I would have 12 firms over the weekend and by Monday morning we could have raised two, three, four, five, six billion dollars. They would be licking their chops and delighted to give us the capital. They would want to be senior to all the other creditors in the capital structure. And what they would do is they would undermine the creditworthiness of of the preferred instruments that we actually want to sell. So So you could just assume with our 75 billion of capital right now, we've already chosen not to raise 20 billion or 30 billion. We could be hundred billion dollars, but we'd be hundred billion and the risk profile. The leverage wouldn't be 11%. You know, the leverage, you know, would go up, you know, and so we actively decided that we don't want to generate leverage, right? We're literally on a path to drive leverage down. We're also on a path, we've decided we we don't want to do deals that don't have positive BTC yield. Um, but more importantly, we're on a mission. The mission is to create the digital credit market.
So, I think the company has two speeds. Well, maybe more than two speeds. When we're coasting, when when uh when the credit markets don't offer us anything compelling and the equity markets aren't compelling, we are coasting. And in my mind, I think that that is a $75 billion company growing 30% a year for the next 20 years. So, that is that is an idol. And then I for those of you who know me, you know I believe in the hypocratic oath do no harm. And so the risk-free rate the rate uh the company is going to get the 30% a year for 20 years if we take no risk. So how do you know what can we do where we feel like it's worthwhile? And of course if if we sell credit we can take that 30% to 40% or to 50%. But we have we have an agenda here. The agenda is not the agenda is not to artfully um manage the balance sheet in you know it's like if you told me well you know you can you could issue $10 billion of junk five to seven years and roll them every year and roll them every quarter and you could pursue a a credit strategy based on debt that gets you a lot more capital and you're continually rolling it. Yeah. And you would do that with 144a offerings. We could like fire up a $2 billion 144a offering next week and we just go do it. But the point is we don't want to be the revolutionary company that adopted digital capital that grew the company with conventional traditional credit. We want to be the revolutionary company that discovered digital capital that then went on to discover and found the digital credit market. And you know when you're just rolling a bunch of five to seven-year bonds and when you're you know when you're opportunistic then uh you know you're careening toward the future with an advantage. I want MSTR to stand for monster. We want to create a monster company. We don't want to carine toward the future with an advantage, you know. We don't want to be the talented fighter, you know, that kind of wins and loses and mostly wins and is a little bit sloppy and undisiplined. We want to create the the digital credit instruments that are two to four times better than everything in the $300 trillion market. And we want to eat the world, right? And we want to sell a hundred billion dollars of them. And after we sell 10 billion, then 20 billion, then 40 billion, then 80 billion. When people go, "Well, aren't you levered?" We want to say, "Well, you know, actually, our leverage is zero." Huh? What? Wait, what? We have 30% amplification, but we don't have 100 billion of debt. We have 100 billion of equity that happens to actually amplify the common equity. Let me educate you on a new way to build a company.
So, so I would say you want to boil that down. It's a very disciplined growth strategy. We would rather coast and have a bulletproof balance sheet and a and a $75 billion company growing 30% a year than to stretch for capital or stretch for for some kind of yield but but undermine the balance sheet and take on credit risk because you know some someone says I'll give you $10 billion tomorrow and it's you know it's senior to STRC we just created volatility and we crumpled the credit of the instrument that is going to provide a comfortable retirement to a billion people. I I don't want to be the dude that made a good trade that made 25 or made $50 billion by trading Bitcoin by using cheap corporate money. We don't want to be the company that made 25 or $50 billion or or a hail mary or maybe we lost it by whatever borrowing money, however we can get it to buy Bitcoin. We want to be the company that provided a comfortable retirement to a billion people and changed the world, right? We want to change the monetary system. I want everybody to get up in America and say, "I'm not getting paid 10% tax deferred from my bank or from my money market. That's not fair. That's an abomination. I'm going to tell all my friends that I'm going to I'm so mad about it. I'm going to go tell my hundred people that I know they all need to pull their money out of the money market. They need to buy stretch and we want to be in a position where we can accommodate that demand." And so what you have is the money that comes easy is always the money that comes with strings attached. And I've learned that over 354 years and I think the people in the Bitcoin treasury market, they're learning it now. Easy money is the toxic money. What you really want is is you want to create a revolutionary new product that solves a problem for $300 trillion of investors and for billions of people. And and you know what? When we sell a billion dollars worth of digital credit, they're giving us the money forever and we're taking no credit risk. But the quidd proquo is we're giving them 10% tax deferred, right? And and so I would rather pay 10% tax deferred and get the money forever than than pay 5% and get the money in the form of a junk bond and pay and pay a taxable 5% coupon. Even if you wanted to give it to me and and Ben, you can see the obvious reason why. The world's full of 50,000 companies that will give you the 5% taxable. How many companies are in the world that will give you 10% gleefully, enthusiastically as a rock dividend and then do everything in their power to to actually issue more dividends. So for us, the credit is the product, right? The the the the aspiration or the offering is a comfortable retirement to everybody who's a credit investor. That's the offering. If we can do it by selling equity, we will. But when the equity, you know, when the equity is diluted, we won't. And uh we won't do debt because debt, you know, debt is a conventional credit idea. It's a 20th century idea. I think I laid out with my seven differentiators for digital credit. We think that digital credit is an inversion of everybody's value system. Every other credit issuer in the world gets up and says, "How do I the credit and pay you the lowest coupon and and maximize the advantages to my company?" And we get up every day and say, "How do we create the greatest credit credit instrument that pays the highest tax tax equivalent cash flows that's going to be best for the buyer, right, for the for the investor." So that's uh that's the answer to your question. Um, hopefully.