Tether's CEO Speaks on His Insanely Profitable Business

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:23)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Joe, it is April here in New York.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

That's right.

Tracy Alloway (0:27)

It is my 10-year anniversary at Bloomberg.

Joe Weisenthal (0:31)

This month?

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

This month.

Joe Weisenthal (0:32)

Oh, that's awesome. You're gonna get a pylon, that's great.

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

It's put me in a very thoughtful mood a whole decade since Joe tricked slash enticed me into coming here. So thank you, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

Are you happy about how it all worked out?

Tracy Alloway (0:46)

I can't complain. I will say, it was a bit rocky in the beginning, but we worked it out.

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

Where's this going?

Tracy Alloway (0:52)

Okay. In that 10 years, a lot of things that I would never have expected to happen have happened.

Joe Weisenthal (1:01)

Yes, go on.

Tracy Alloway (1:02)

Well, one of them is the phenomenal growth of the crypto industry. So I first started writing about Bitcoin in 2011, and I will openly admit that I think by 2013, I had written I think like three or four obituaries for Bitcoin as well. So, you know, I got that wrong, clearly. But one of the other things I got wrong on crypto is the phenomenal growth of stablecoins. So you look at something like Tether, the world's biggest stablecoin, we talk about it in the same sentence nowadays as Eurodollars, for instance. And the company itself is this huge player in financial markets. Like it owns more T-bills nowadays than some countries, which is all pretty amazing.

Joe Weisenthal (1:48)

Well, let's be honest for a second here. You know, you might have thought that Tether wouldn't even exist at this point because it had a reputation for years and years. Like there are a bunch of scammers. They can't pass an audit. The money isn't there, etc. It's going to go away. Why would you ever hold a Tether? We asked Sam Bankman for that years ago. Why would you hold a Tether when there are other companies that have done audits, etc. There are many people not only setting aside the size, but setting aside all of the assets that it owns that backs the world's most popular stablecoin. There are many people who just thought, this company can't continue.

Tracy Alloway (2:19)

Oh, totally. The other thing I thought was that US officials were never going to grow comfortable with the idea of a loosely regulated foreign company creating synthetic dollars. But the Trump administration seems to have some other ideas. So we should talk about all of that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:34)

Let's do it. We have the perfect guest.

Tracy Alloway (2:35)

We do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino. He is of course the head of the world's largest stablecoin. So Paolo, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Paolo Ardoino (2:46)

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here today.

Tracy Alloway (2:50)

So just to begin, has Tether's growth surprised you? Did you ever expect to ramp up to this degree?

Paolo Ardoino (2:58)

So I joined Tether very early, was early 2015, just after a couple of months that was actually created.

And we were discussing internally, myself and John Carlo, and we were asking ourselves, the biggest number we could think about in terms of growth and projection of growth of our stablecoin was between $100 million and $1 billion. And now today is $144 billion in total issued tokens. So we are incredibly excited. We are impressed ourself. But I must say that it all happened organically over a decade.

Joe Weisenthal (3:37)

The stablecoin business is so sick, it seems to me, right? Because you hold all of these assets that back one to one, these tokens that move on blockchains, and you collect all this interest, and the holders of the coins don't collect any interest. According to a release on Tether's own website, you made $13 billion in 2024 Various estimates have your total employees somewhere a little bit below $200 million, so that makes per-profit employees somewhere close to $90 million per employee. That's basically correct math, that this is one of the most extraordinary, maybe the most profitable business in the history of business.

Paolo Ardoino (4:16)

Yeah, I think it's definitely extraordinary. I defined Tether once in a century company because of the capital that we have given our profits. In the last two years and a half, we made around 20 billion in profits and we almost distributed, well, we distributed a very, very tiny part to the shareholders. I mean, a name, another company, another fund or whatever that distributed less than 10% or probably even less than 5% of profits to their own shareholders. So that is something that is unprecedented and it's set in Tether to be able to reinvest 95% of its profits in keeping growing its distribution network for the US dollar and also invest in other pretty cool things from artificial intelligence, Bitcoin mining and the tens of other opportunities around the world.