Bitcoin at $100K? Strategy CEO Phong Le's Bold Prediction

All right, welcome back. Checking on shares of strategy higher after the company sold more than 1,600 Bitcoins last week raising roughly $105 million. Now, it's part of a major overhaul aimed at shoring up strategies finances and rebuilding some investor confidence including buying back preferred stock. So, will strategies strategy work? Joining us now for a first on CNBC interview is strategy [music] CEO Phong Le. Thank you so much for joining us Phong for this you know, as I'm looking right now the prices for Bitcoin just a little below 64,000. So, call it roughly half of what it was at the highs just in the last 12 months alone. We're closer to the bottoms here at the 52-week range than the than the than the top. What exactly is your outlook for it and how exactly are you navigating this kind of price action given your corporate balance sheet needs? >> Yeah, look I think Bitcoin's going through a bear cycle right now and some of that is external macroeconomic. I think there's a major funding that's happening with AI. I think there's uncertainty with interest rates, there's uncertainty with wars around the world and there's uncertainty with governmental legislation. We as a company went through this in 2022. We actively manage our capital structure. We rotate into Bitcoin. We sell Bitcoin when we need to and we'll continue to do so and we'll get through this bear market. And what what strategy's designed to do is to outperform Bitcoin in a bull cycle which I I expect to happen next year. >> You mentioned those factors that that were driving some of the downside action and sentiment. It wasn't that long ago that many of those factors were reasons to be in cryptocurrencies and specifically in Bitcoin. The fact that they were decentralized from traditional finance. That the reasons because you didn't have some of the exposure to fiat currencies and some of the geopolitical aspects, cross-border transactions. Why that sentiment shift and how do you get back to a zone where Bitcoin becomes one of those positive plays on those uncertainties yet again? >> Yeah, I think that will still be the case. The biggest catalyst that will start to cause Bitcoin to move forward is legislative clarity. And what I mean is we need the SEC and the Treasury and the CFTC to move forward with a set of excellent rules that they have planned to allow tokenization of real-world assets, to allow stablecoins to be implemented. What will happen then is large banks, and we've seen them, will start to move into this space, and that will be a major catalyst for Bitcoin. And I think that will also allow Bitcoin to be the inflation hedge that we expect it to be. >> Following our graphic just showed that your average cost was $75,000 per Bitcoin and we're at 63 today. So, are you a forced seller of Bitcoin? >> No, we're not a forced seller of Bitcoin. The average cost is not that important to us. It's really was were our Bitcoin purchases accretive to our common shareholders and our Bitcoin per share, and they always have been. Uh we're selling Bitcoin from time to time, and and you know, we've shown that our Bitcoin sales are not really a major portion of what occurs in the market, but sometimes it makes sense to sell Bitcoin to add to our US dollar reserves, sometimes it makes sense to pay dividends, and that's what we've been doing. >> When we spoke about this last time, the first time you had sold, you said it was to test the market. Uh what is the rationale to shareholders for why selling Bitcoin gives them more share more value per share when the original idea was that buying Bitcoin as it continues to move higher would give them kind of leverage returns. Now, of course, the share your shares are down by half. What is the shareholder value you are creating by selling your Bitcoin here? >> Well, I'll start with the big picture, right? The big picture is we have net 142,000 or 100 Sorry, 170,000 Bitcoin we've added this year. We've added over 35 x the number of Bitcoin that we sold. So, I think focusing on the sales of Bitcoin it it is really focusing on a very small amount. We've done in the last couple weeks to pay dividends. We've done in the last few weeks to buy back strash which is trading below par and that's a creative to Bitcoin per share when we do.