Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - October 16th, 2026

Carol Massar (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead, with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy, plus global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily podcast with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. On Bloomberg Radio.

Carol Massar (0:31)

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend Podcast. Earnings got underway this past week as the big banks reported and disappointed. The AI trade and spend came under question as CoreWeave's credit risk climbed to an all-time high rattled by the AI cloud computing company's plans to ramp up borrowing. We also got an inflation print that came in hot, reigniting fears of higher interest rates that could make the AI infrastructure boom more expensive to finance. Let's see how it's all connected.

All of this though is covered on the Bloomberg and at bloomberg.com.

Tim Stenovec (1:05)

It's a backdrop that feels surprisingly modern, yet as it turns out, we've actually walked this path before. Later this hour, we sit down with the author of 1873, The Rothschilds, The First Great Depression and the Making of a Modern World. It's a narrative on how the Rothschilds' massive capital deployment into global infrastructure in the 19th century unleashed a historic frenzy of speculation.

And maybe, just maybe, there's a little bit of a resemblance to the eye-watering sums that tech giants are pouring into AI infrastructure today.

Carol Massar (1:37)

That is coming up in just a moment. But first up, we've been reporting on how corporate Bitcoin buying has been picking up again as more companies move crypto back onto their balance sheets. Strategy is leading that charge. The company recently added another $21 million of Bitcoin, giving it a total holding of $70 billion in Bitcoin. That's about 4% of total supply.

Tim Stenovec (2:02)

Strategy CEO Michael Saylor now says that Bitcoin will climb back above $100,000, arguing that the AI spend is actually pushing investors instead towards scarce assets like Bitcoin, that robots can't replicate.

We caught up with him earlier this week, not on Bloomberg Businessweek, but rather on another program that Carol and I hosted, Bloomberg Crypto. We absolutely loved the chat. It began with Michael Saylor's upbeat outlook for Bitcoin.

Michael Saylor (2:28)

Well, we think we're at the beginning of a bull market.

We normally look at where Bitcoin is versus 200-week moving average, and we bounced slightly below it. Now we're moving up 25% premium. So the headwinds were restrictive trade policy, restrictive foreign policy, restrictive currency, or monetary policy. And now we're rotating into some tailwinds. We've got a very favorable regulatory environment. We've got banking adoption accelerating. We've got tokenized securities and the digital asset space accelerating. We've got the formation and the strengthening of digital credit networks and, of course, banking credit coming online. And all these things are very auspicious for the asset.

Carol Massar (3:16)

Having said that, I feel like, Michael, everyone is competing for capital against AI.

So much money flowing into it. We see it just kind of squeezing out investments elsewhere. How long do you think that continues? And what kind of an impact are you guys feeling in the crypto space as a result?

Michael Saylor (3:34)

Well, you can see that AI is going to demonetize a lot of equities that are based upon labor and talent. And so there's a lot of risk in the AI trade, especially across equities, either equities that are attempting to create the next magic product and they might miss, or equities that are based upon tens of thousands of humans and they're getting demonetized and degraded. On the other hand, there's gonna be a rotation into scarce desirable capital, whether that's Palm Beach real estate or gold or digital gold in the form of Bitcoin or some trophy asset.

Capital investors are gonna look for things that the robots can't make more of. And certainly, the king of commodities right now is Bitcoin because it's digital capital.

Tim Stenovec (4:19)

So why haven't we seen that yet? Because the narrative that you're explaining right now, we've seen it hit, let's say, with the SaaSpocalypse, and we've seen concerns about software companies, Michael, when it comes to the AI trade. If the thesis that you espouse comes true and that people will look for stuff with scarcity, why hasn't it materialized with Bitcoin yet?

Michael Saylor (4:41)

Well, if we look at the Bitcoin standard era, which started when we bought our first Bitcoin in August of 2020, Bitcoin is up approximately 38 percent a year every year. MSTR, the digital equity that our company represents, is up 52 or 53 percent every year. The only stock you know of that's outperforming that is Nvidia. Every other Mag-7 stock and all the other major S&P stocks are underperforming that.