Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast on Aug. 6, Saylor said he turned to the AI chatbot after Strategy had exhausted more conventional ways of raising capital to buy more bitcoin.
The 61-year-old explained that the figure referred to the amount Strategy raised through a series of preferred stock offerings rather than his personal earnings.
He said ChatGPT helped develop the structure of the securities after the company’s earlier reliance on convertible debt reached its limits. The products were designed to finance additional bitcoin purchases while appealing to income-focused investors, Fortune reported.
“You don’t want to learn how to do things the AI can do,” he said. “What you want to do is learn how to ask the AI to do something that’s never been done before. If you want to create these incredible success things, you want to locate the magic opportunity.”
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Physical coins with Bitcoin logo placed on U.S. dollars notes. Illustration from Pexels |
Saylor, whose net worth is estimated at $4 billion by Forbes, founded software company MicroStrategy in 1989. The company, now known as Strategy, transformed itself into a bitcoin-focused business in 2020 and became the first publicly traded company to make the cryptocurrency a core treasury asset.
Strategy has since become the world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder. It owns nearly 850,000 bitcoins worth more than $50 billion at current market prices.
It is not the first time Saylor has credited AI for helping shape the company’s financing strategy. At Strategy’s developer conference last year, he said he used ChatGPT’s Deep Research mode to help design its convertible preferred stock products, according to Forbes.
Saylor said the experience reinforced his belief that workers and entrepreneurs should focus on directing AI rather than competing with it.
“If you’re in your working years where you want to upgrade the world and make a difference and be remembered for something—then a pretty simple principle is don’t keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year, fighting against the modern automation, epidemic.”
“Don’t try to outwork the robots,” he said, adding that while using AI is a “no brainer,” the real advantage comes from asking better questions instead of simply automating existing tasks.
Saylor is not the only business leader urging professionals to view AI as a tool for innovation rather than a threat to their jobs.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said AI will boost productivity but that the future of work will still depend on uniquely human capabilities. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has similarly argued that those who use AI to solve real-world problems could create unprecedented wealth.