Something odd is happening: stocks keep climbing while bitcoin is down 30% this year and roughly half off its peak. More interesting is the explanation from Michael Saylor, the man who bet his entire company on bitcoin. His culprit: AI. Mega-deals like Google's and SpaceX's have vacuumed up hundreds of billions of dollars, money that would once have flowed into crypto. Crypto didn't cool off; something hotter showed up. Rubinstein then goes a level deeper. Saylor's company, Strategy, buys bitcoin with borrowed money and specially designed securities, the flagship being Stretch: a security whose dividend is continuously adjusted to keep its price pinned at $100. It has raised $10.5B this way. With bitcoin still sliding, the question of this piece is whether that elaborate funding tower can stay standing.
Why it matters · The AI buildout is not just absorbing capital, it is draining it from somewhere. Saylor is naming where.