Bitcoin Investing in the Age of AI: Why Miners are Pivoting w/ MARA CEO Fred Thiel

**Spencer Nichols** (0:00)
An interesting phrase, like, mullet data centers where AI in the front, and then you have the Bitcoin party in the back that's shutting on and off.

**Fred Thiel** (0:06)
The AI business, you have power in the bottom, then you have chips, then you have infrastructure, then you have system software, then you have application. We believe that owning that bottom layer or owning the control of that bottom layer is critical. All of the same stuff we did in the Bitcoin world, oh, I've got a megawatt of power, I'm running machines of 50 joules per tera hash. Well, if I have a machine that runs at 25 joules per tera hash, I now just doubled my Bitcoin mining capacity on that same amount of power. It's the exact same dynamic that is happening in the AI industry. Best thing for us is we get to operate those sites, the Bitcoin mining sites until the AI comes online.

**Spencer Nichols** (0:47)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. My name is Spencer Nichols and today I'm sitting down with the one and only Fred Thiel of MARA. Fred, welcome to the show. Excited to speak with you today.

**Fred Thiel** (0:57)
Great to be here.

**Spencer Nichols** (0:58)
Excellent. Well, I think right now we're at a very interesting point in both Bitcoin and the AI story. How these two have diverged in terms of the price dynamics of one Bitcoin commodity, but also the AI industry at large, really seeing significant growth in the last year to six months. I think the energy story has been a huge part of that. I think people are really trying to understand where the bottlenecks in the AI supply chain lie, whether that's in the hardware side, the energy side, and how those dynamics are playing out.
I'm really excited to dive into that with you today. But I think before we got on air here, we were talking a little bit about this Don't Panic poster right behind you here, Fred. I think with Bitcoin sitting around 63K here today during this interview, what words would you have for the audience here who's wondering, where does Bitcoin go from here? I know it's a tough question to lead off with, but we welcome your thoughts.

**Fred Thiel** (1:50)
I think if you go back to our Q3 earnings call last year, which was in September, we felt the market was a little frothy between the digital asset treasury companies and the ETFs. There was a way overblown demand in the market which wasn't normal. If you look back to the early days of Bitcoin to today, you normalize price on that curve, you'll see that we've kind of reverted to mean and we're still adjusting back. The price area of the mid 50s is kind of where there's very strong support for the price of Bitcoin at this point. And what's going to drive further price appreciation is, very macro Bitcoin is highly correlated to macro. And because it's a risk on asset in most people's minds, it's correlated with what's happening in the stock market. So if Trump says we're going to own the straights or moves, the market goes down, Bitcoin goes down, the dollar goes up.
If we all of a sudden have peace with Iran and inflation is tame, then dollar go down, Bitcoin go up, and stock market go up. So this kind of, you've got this macro market correlation and you've got this risk correlation and equity market correlation. And unfortunately, the geopolitical world and the political world right now are causing a lot of yo-yos and Bitcoin is a market where, because Bitcoin doesn't provide any native yield, it is a place where people want to put their capital. And if Bitcoin starts assuming a number of days of continual appreciation and price, then it builds momentum. And we saw that for a period of time earlier this year where it was already clung back and was, we came from the 50s back up into the 60s and we're progressing well up there. But I think right now it's very driven by exogenous events. And I don't think that if clarity bill were to pass, I don't think it's going to have a huge impact on Bitcoin.
I think Michael Saylor has provided a little bit of an overhang with stretch and that whole model. When you've got somebody who holds nearly 900,000 Bitcoin on their balance sheet or maybe over 900,000 at this point, the fear of a liquidation event is definitely going to fuel a lot of shorts. So you've got a lot of these events going on with Bitcoin. And I think, unfortunately, we're in this situation where because there isn't an actual beneficial business use case for Bitcoin other than as a store of value, you have to wait for people to believe it's the right place to put their money again. And right now, they've been chasing AI stocks that have been going up, and they've been chasing SpaceX and things like that. Long-winded answer, but I think you've got a lot of exogenous events driving people's perception of the value of Bitcoin. And we need people outside of the Bitcoin community to view Bitcoin as valuable for Bitcoin price to go up.