“I think there's a human desire, clearly, to seek gambling. And I think Bitcoin has been a gambling proxy that's been outcompeted by Kalshi and Polymarket and a bunch of other things.”
Money Stuff: The Podcast · October 2026
Brown is explaining to Matt Levine why he bought shares of a Bitcoin treasury company once they traded well below the value of the Bitcoin they held. He thinks Bitcoin's appeal as a bet could come back, and cheap non-recourse leverage would magnify that.
Transcript
That was after awkward conflict with the management. I was originally a 13G filer. Because
when I wrote about this after getting your email, I was like, there's a trade that was in huge vogue, which was you can take $100 worth of Bitcoin and sell it for $200 on the stock exchange. And now that trade has flipped. Five months later,
Sony. Now we're fast working ahead. You've gone from August 2025 to January 2026 when all of these went from 200% MNAV to, in this case, I can't remember. It was like in the 70s on an MNAV basis, but on this PB, let's go back to that. It got down to 57% PB. And I think Bitcoin is an interesting gambling proxy. Like the intrinsic value is based on the discounted cash flows that you'll receive in the future from ASTAT. But we do a good business in art. We do a good business in a bunch of non-cash flowing real estate. I think there's a human desire, clearly, to seek gambling. And I think Bitcoin has been a gambling proxy that's been outcompeted by Cal Street and Polymark and a bunch of other things. But I think it's an interesting gambling proxy that might return. And if you can get this non-recourse leverage on it, non-cross-collateral leverage on it, you could achieve extraordinary outcomes if Bitcoin returned to even where it had been before, much less a higher…
So when I got an email from you being like, I want to liquidate it as a file of 13. If it's trading at a discount, it's just the same trade in reverse. You buy shares for 80 cents and you liquidate the Bitcoin for 100 cents. Of course. But you were still like, I mean, by the time you emailed me…
a long time. I mean, a lot of the money was deployed in a short period of time. There was a day when the stock was down 23%, the trading price of stock. So if you have something that was already trading at some discount and the stock falls 20 plus percent a day, that's a day you're going to buy a…
the management to get a cheeseburger. And it's been messy.
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