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am the person at Hut 8 who designed the American Bitcoin partnership.
The structure is elegant. We gave the Trump family 20% of a publicly traded mining company. They contributed zero capital. Zero infrastructure. Zero employees. Zero operational experience. Zero risk exposure.
They contributed a name. Per our partnership agreement, that is consideration. Twenty percent of our equity for access to the most valuable retail distribution channel in American finance.
“It has to have ‘America,'” Eric said in our first meeting. “And it has to have ‘Bitcoin.'” He said this twice. Both times he pointed at the whiteboard. There was nothing else on the whiteboard. I realized then that he understood the product better than I did. The product is not bitcoin. The product is the belief.
The entire business model. Two words and a surname. I wrote the term sheet on one page. The lawyers billed for forty. We call that alignment of incentives. Forty pages means they believed in the durability of the arrangement.
We mine bitcoin at an all-in cost of approximately $90,000 per coin. Hash rate, power purchase agreements, ASIC depreciation, facility lease, headcount, Coinbase Prime interest — $90,000. Bitcoin trades at $77,000. Every coin we mine loses $13,000. Negative unit economics on every block reward. Eric tells investors we mine at $57,000. He strips out depreciation, SG&A, and the debt service. I asked him once if he understood what depreciation meant. He said it means when things go down. I said yes. He said: “But the stock goes up.” I said yes.
His only contractual obligation. Salesmanship. Per the partnership agreement, salesmanship is Eric’s sole KPI. Technically, he is a fiduciary to shareholders. On paper, his vesting is tied to total comp benchmarks. We run the rigs. He runs the ticker. Asset-light.
The company at peak reached a $13.2 billion valuation.
Two employees. That is the entire headcount.
One is our CEO Mike Ho, who is simultaneously Hut 8’s Chief Strategy Officer. He reports to us at Hut 8 on Monday mornings and reports to American Bitcoin shareholders on Tuesday mornings. Dual-reporting structure. Very efficient. The other employee manages Eric’s media calendar. $6.6 billion per headcount. We call this capital efficiency.
70% of our bitcoin did not come from mining.
It came from selling stock.
Retail investors purchase American Bitcoin shares at 50 times book value because the name contains “America” and “Bitcoin” and “Trump” is in the filing and they believe, with the quiet religious certainty of people who have never read a balance sheet in their lives, that a company named American Bitcoin is underwritten by something more substantial than two words and a surname. We take their cash and buy bitcoin on Coinbase at spot. Lodge it on the balance sheet. Call ourselves a mining company. We do mine. At a loss. Technically, the earnings are negative per our Q4 filing. The margin lives in the distance between what the stock costs them and what the bitcoin costs us.
The stock is down 92% from peak. Investors have lost approximately $500 million. One of them posted on the shareholder subreddit that he moved his daughter’s 529 into American Bitcoin at $14. It trades under $2. He said he believed in the mission. That means he believed in the name. The name performed exactly as designed. Eric’s net worth went from $190 million to $280 million. Asset-light.
We pledged 3,090 bitcoin as collateral against a Coinbase Prime custody loan. We have mined 1,800. The LTV ratio is inverted. If bitcoin compresses or the loan accelerates, every coin mined since inception could be forfeit by August 2027. All of it. Gone. Liquidation event. I explained this in a memo to Eric. Bullet points. Large font. He asked if the stock could go up before August. I said probably. He said that was fine. He said he’d handle it. Salesmanship.
Eric told the press he launched American Bitcoin because banks were “debanking” the Trump family. I checked. JPMorgan refinanced $700 million in Trump Organization debt during the identical period. But debanking is better salesmanship than refinancing. The narrative inflates the stock price. The stock price generates the bitcoin. The bitcoin secures the loan. The loan generates cash. Every link in the chain is a product I built or a story Eric told. Asset-light.
I orchestrated the celebrity endorsements. Tyler Winklevoss. Anthony Scaramucci. Grant Cardone. We call this pipeline development. Each broadcast the stock to their audiences during the run-up. The stock collapsed afterward. The celebrities did not lose money. Their audiences lost money. I never mentioned that we hemorrhage $13,000 per coin mined. I told them it was asset-light. They understood immediately. They are also asset-light.
Eric cannot legally serve as a corporate officer in the state of New York. A judge barred him for two years. Civil fraud. So his title is not CEO. Not officer. Not executive. His contractual role is salesmanship. He cannot manage the company. He can sell it. One distinction. $90 million in personal net worth gained. Asset-light.
Our CEO lives in the UAE. He held discussions with ADQ and TAQA, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth apparatus. The same sovereign apparatus that paid $500 million for 49% of World Liberty Financial, the family’s other crypto operation. This is the same Abu Dhabi whose semiconductor imports the administration greenlit over national security objections. I did not design World Liberty Financial. I designed the mining subsidiary that feeds into it. Separate projects. Complementary revenue streams. Eric runs salesmanship for both. I admire the portfolio diversification.
I gave Eric 20% of a company for free, a company with real miners and real facilities and real electricity bills that I built over seven years in Alberta and Texas and Ontario, and in exchange he gave me access to every American who hears “America” and “Bitcoin” in the same sentence and reaches for their brokerage app without checking whether the company mines at a profit or at a loss or at all.
They drove the stock to a $13.2 billion market capitalization. We bought bitcoin with the proceeds. They lost $500 million. We kept the bitcoin. Eric kept $90 million. I kept the apparatus that manufactures both. Everybody got what they paid for.
Asset-light means we carry nothing. Not the miners. Not the facilities. Not the risk. Not the losses.
The investors carry those.
We carry the bitcoin.
Asset-light.
Chapter 1 to Chapter 14’s an “Easter Egg” at #ch1 to #ch14. Including #ch2 which’s chapter 2 at my house in Napa California
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejeIz4EhoJ0
On 09-09-39, “What They Will NEVER Teach You at Stanford Business School” debuts at 300 w 44th St at New York Fashion Week’s front row
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXIaNZi3mHQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXIaNZi3mHQ
What A Super Model Can Teach a Harvard MBA About Credit www.slideshare.net/larrychiang/what-a-super-model-can-teach-a-harvard-mba-about-credit
American Express hosts me mentoring you about FICO scores at New York Fashion Week
t.co/inxTmZAj
My video boils down 20,000 hours and moves you to the right on the entrepreneur bell curve
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eudADPfTWiE
Steve Jobs Texted me on 650-283-8008 in the same way that Mr Jobs called Bill Hewlett https://x.com/superSaiyanSkai/status/1941392367304761636/video/1
Larry Chiang
Fund of Founders
Founding Stanford EIR
@duck9 alum, Deeply Understood Capital Credit Chinese Knowledge 9
Solo Founder Uber API
650-566-9600 Office
650-566-9696 Direct
Cell: 415-720-8500
650-283-8008 (cell)
Editor of the widely syndicated “What They Don’t Teach at School”
whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com/blog
whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com/blog
CNN Video Channel: ireport.cnn.com/people/larrychiang
Read my last 10 X posts at www.X.com/LarryChiang
Author of #WTDTYASBS a NY Times Bestseller released 09-09-09 at #NYFW on a runway under the tents
whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com/blog/?s=Ny+times+bestseller
www.fastcompany.com/embed/c0d4562ea2049
52 Cards. Two Jokers. What They DO Teach You at Stanford Engineering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDBY0GkI3-g
Emergency swings and cutting deals as an 9 year old
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFGY7v9C4G0
Hunter Pence shared thoughts before winning WORLD SERIES’ Game #7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usu0luYy9pw
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