Money is economic energy: Strategy's Michael Saylor store of value question

Michael Saylor, the chairman of Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), has published a new essay on X explaining his bold views on money, Bitcoin, and the future of the economy. 

He argues that money is essentially “economic energy” and that Bitcoin is the best technology to store that energy.

Is money economic energy? 

In an essay titled “What Is Money?” written by Michael Saylor, the chairman of Strategy, and Robert Breedlove, money is defined as the technology that lets people store the value of their labor, move it forward in time, and send it across distance. 

Saylor’s phrase for that value is “economic energy,” and within his essay, he asks a single question: how effectively does any monetary system conserve it?

He explains that “good money” should let you store the value of your work, move it forward in time, and send it across long distances without experiencing “monetary entropy,” which is a loss of value. 

Saylor wrote that gold, as a store of value, earns points for its scarcity and durability, but it is also heavy, costly to move, costly to secure and audit, and is dependent on custodians once it enters the financial system, making it mechanically defective. 

Government-issued money does not have gold’s portability problem, but it hands control of supply and rules to governments and central banks.

In the essay, Bitcoin is described as a digital monetary energy. It has no physical mass, no central issuer, and a supply fixed at 21 million coins. 

What does Elon Musk think about money? 

Prior to Saylor publishing his essay, there was an ongoing conversation about what an AI-driven economy does to money. 

Elon Musk has predicted that artificial intelligence will make goods abundant and eventually render money irrelevant through what he calls a universal high income. 

Saylor pushed back on that view in a Diary of a CEO interview with host Steven Bartlett, published earlier this month, telling Bartlett that people will always chase scarce, status-conferring goods because “we’re status-oriented animals.”

Strategy currently holds 840,447 BTC, the largest disclosed corporate stack. The company has been a net seller of BTC in recent months, offloading 1,690 Bitcoin for about $108.6 million in early August to buy back its STRC preferred shares, per Cryptopolitan’s reporting. 

The company’s CEO, Phong Le, has stated that Strategy expects to resume buying before year-end. 

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