Jim Chanos on the Nuttiness of 'Bitcoin Treasury Companies'
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Hello there, OddLots listeners. You are about to listen to a very special episode. This is a conversation recorded live at our recent event in New York. That's right. We had a live OddLots event on June 26th. We had tons of conversations. We're going to be rolling them out in the days ahead. But the first one we want to bring you was our headliner for the night, Jim Chanos. That's right. The famous

Named short seller. He was there giving us all his thoughts on the market right now. So take a listen. All right. First question. Are Bitcoin treasury companies the stupidest thing you've ever seen in your entire life? You know, it's rarely, rarely that I have to increase my personal security after a podcast, which I had to do after our last podcast together when I said some intemperate things about Bitcoin treasury companies.

Look, I mean, look, here's the thing. I get people very agitated about this and they point out on just what a genius idea this is. And I keep trying to point out to them, I'm doing the same thing that guys like Michael Saylor are doing. I'm on the same side of the trade. And I keep pointing out to my critics, you're on the opposite side of that trade. And you don't want to be on the opposite side of the trade.

And the Bitcoin treasury paradox being that you are the one buying the pieces of paper that have infinite supply so that Michael Saylor and I can buy the digital asset with the limited supply. And it makes kind of no sense. So what will inevitably happen is happening. And that is there's nothing proprietary here. This is just simply raising capital to buy digital.

a financial asset, and other companies will do this. And in fact, even since the podcast we last did, I think the number of companies that have announced this strategy scores more. I think there's over 100 in the U.S. and over 200 globally now.

So who's actually buying MicroStrategy? Because, you know, I thought... Everybody on my timeline. Okay. But I thought once the spot ETFs, the spot Bitcoin ETFs came out, like this business model would go away and it hasn't. No, because there's a wonderful sales job that's being done about the fact that this is an economic engine in and of itself. And so therefore, terms like Bitcoin yields are used and I've called them financial gibberish.

Because they are and and in fact this will get armed away Ultimately by companies that will do this to try to capture that spread in the case of MicroStrategy is substantial. It's still 50 billion dollars something like that of the difference between the value of the enterprise value of the company and the value of their Bitcoin holdings but the thing that really kind of shot me into orbit on all this was when I

Saylor and others then said well no you can't really value us on an NAV basis the so-called MNAV multiple of NAV you actually have to also give us additional value for the amount of profit that we make every quarter from the appreciation in the asset I just pointed out I said well that's like saying you know my whole net worth is in a house that's worth four hundred thousand dollars that

that is now worth $500,000 a year or two later. And my net worth is not $500,000 now, it's $2.5 million because it's the value of the house plus a multiple on the increase in the profitability of the asset. When you put it that way, it sounds a little absurd. It is absurd.

There's like 200 of them now, right? It's over 200 globally. Yeah. Wait, I have one more question. Why did MicroStrategy, I have to remember to call them strategy, but I can't bring myself to do it. Why did they switch from issuing the convertible debt to preferred shares? Because he realized that as he began to issue more and more common, it was putting pressure on the premiums.

So now the latest iteration is, well, we're going to do this quasi-equity security, quasi-debt, preferred stock, and then we can torque up, we can lever up the balance sheet. Now, this is a company whose selling point a year ago was we're not going to lever because we have this wonderful equity that we can issue at a premium, and now they're saying, well...

You know, if maybe if it trades above 2x, we'll issue equity. But if it's between 1 and 2x, we'll do preferred. And then if it's below 1x, we'll buy back common. And then what is Chano's going to do? To which I said, well, I'll be out of the trade by then. You know, if it's 1x NAV, it's not a trade. So that's kind of the latest game plan. But stay tuned. It'll change. I think the narrative keeps changing.

The other one is, of course, that MicroStrategy will be putting the S&P 500. And so that will be untold riches for everyone that doesn't know that's going to happen.

We got to move off this topic because I just find it so depressing. You know, like I read the news and they're like, oh, like, you know, some big breakthrough with batteries in China is happening or whatever. And then the big entrepreneurial innovation in the United States is the 200th company that's borrowing money. Like it's too bleak. When you really think about it, it's too bleak to contemplate. So on Tuesday or Wednesday morning, shares in real estate companies fell after Omdani's victory. What's your take on New York City real estate these days?

Well, I guess I'm glad I sold my apartment last year. But look, I...

Think a lot of people are surprised clearly New York City real estate and commercial real estate will be challenged if a lot of things happen That the current frontrunner, you know wants to happen I think there's a lot of restrictions that will be put in front of making some of that stuff happen But my friends in New York City commercial real estate have said really the regulatory framework and the legislative framework in New York and New York City has done nothing but get worse over the last 15 years and

And I'm kind of stunned that some of the publicly traded companies like Vornado and SL Green still have the cap rates as low as they do. I mean, SLG we looked at yesterday and its cap rate is still 5.2%.

You're short SLG, right? We've been short SLG on and off for a number of years, and we are again. And I just, I don't get the risk reward on a 5.2% cap rate on New York City commercial real estate right now. I think it should be 7 or 8. That's right. You can get 4.5% by buying a treasury. Right, exactly. So if you're buying it at 5.2, you're, and that's reed accounting. Reed accounting is also pretty squirrely, by the way, for a lot of reasons.

You know, they don't include overhead in the cap rate. And of course there is real Depreciation and some of this stuff this maintenance capex in New York City. It's pretty high and that doesn't include any capex so

I don't get it. I don't see rents going up here. I guess it would be the easiest way. And that'd be the only reason you'd be buying office buildings at a five cap. What about residential? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's weird. I mean, your audience knows better than I do. I mean, it's problematic in so many ways. There's not enough supply. There's all kinds of weird regulations. Things are expensive. And you can kind of see why Mamdami's

message resonated with a lot of people. A lot of it has to do with the cost of living here. Have you been on the receiving end, or I guess dialing, of any of the calls to gather capital for a challenger? Well, I'm not a New Yorker anymore, but the answer is yeah. Which? Receiving or calling? Receiving. I'm not calling.

But yeah, sure. And who are they saying? I'm not good. I'm not going to get into that. Those are private conversations. I think I think they're all pretty, pretty silly at this point. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good try. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, well, since we mentioned the word bleak a couple times in these conversations now, is it bleak being a short seller in the current market? It's not a lot of fun, but it's never really been fun. I mean, I started my original fund back in 85. The Dow was at 1300. So it's pretty much, you know, we started hedging back in 96.

So, you know, it's always a slug. It's never easy. It's why a lot of people don't do it. On the other hand, the idiosyncratic opportunities, most things fail, as you know. And the idiosyncratic opportunities have probably never been greater, given the market we have now and with things like Bitcoin treasury companies and all kinds of other things. It's just a sort of head scratchers.

and are a function of general animal spirits. So there's a lot to do. And I think that's the fun part of what I do is there's a lot to do and seemingly more every year. But

Some of the stuff going on right now is a bit of a head scratcher. We don't try to predict where the market's going, but the animal spirits are definitely back. You know, it's like several years ago or 2021, people could have blamed Zerp. It's like, oh, it's because the rates are at zero and that's why everyone's going crazy. And I do think it's really interesting how much speculative activity has persisted.

The Zerp excuse does not hold water anymore. So we got to find something new. Speaking of idiosyncratic opportunities, one thing you've been talking about a lot and multiple times on the show is the data center REITs. And Equinix, I think, just had two terrible days in a row. What's going on with that? So these are the companies that have clouds, but they're not like the hyperscalers. What's their deal? I think...

The legacy data centers, and there's only a couple of companies in the United States that really have legacy data centers. There's Equinix, there's Digital Realty, and then there's sort of the old colony capitals now called Digital Bridge, and they own these things sort of in fund format. And when we took a look at this with our partner back in 22, we

The idea was pretty simple, and we did not see the AI explosion in mid-22, but the idea was it was a pretty crummy business then, working on the cloud and SaaS demand, but it became a really bad business with the advent of AI because it just moved the hyperscalers to invest more in state-of-the-art data centers. And these are older data centers that were short.

And the idea being that the new GPU centric data centers need liquid cooling. They basically need all the infrastructure ripped out and replaced.

And the business was not a high return on capital business before this. It's getting even worse now. And what Equinix said yesterday at their analyst day was that revenues were not going to quite be what people thought they would be. But more ominously, CapEx was going to keep increasing. And that's what we've been saying, that these are not like.

Warehouses where you're just going to collect a check these are actually operating businesses where you have to service the the servers you have to make sure there's redundancy it's just it's a business a tech business and

And they're traded as REITs, and that was kind of the opportunity. That was the sort of dichotomy in valuation. So people added back the depreciation, as they do with REITs, and they valued them on a so-called FFO or AFFO, which is a cash flow metric. But in fact, unlike warehouses, shopping centers, to a lesser extent office buildings, the capex was real. Depreciation was a real expense.

so to give you an example with equinex yesterday they said our capex is now going to bump up to between 4 and 5 billion a year the problem is their ebitda this year is expected to be 4.5 billion so all of that's going to go to capex meaning they're going to have to basically borrow or issue equity to pay their interest in dividends and that's just the definition of a bad business and it's a business that's not growing very fast so unlike other really true ai companies which are growing

25, 30, 40% a year. These guys are growing 3%, 5%, 6%, sort of with GDP. So there's no growing your way out of this. And so they're just really bad businesses trading at just nosebleed valuations. ♪

Probably the most pressing concern that I see with regards to the investable quality of our industry is that it's so, so tied to fuel price. So you'll see that as fuel prices rise, our stocks go down and vice versa. It's just very difficult for people to manage through. But we have seen sustained periods of growth over the last decade, and a few of the airlines have done very well. To learn more about the evolution and investment opportunities of the airline industry, subscribe to PGM's The Outthinking Investor.

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EasyCater, your business tool for food. To learn more, visit easycater.com/podcast. - On the topic of idiosyncratic opportunities, I gotta ask about Carvana 'cause when my husband and I moved back to the States in 2022, we bought a used car through Carvana and that was a mistake 'cause it took us about six months to actually get the car and they lost all our paperwork and it was just an absolute nightmare.

And I thought at the time, this is a company whose entire business model is basically built on regulation, right? Like that's what they're doing. And I thought they're not going to have a future if they are this bad at it. And yet the stock is up. It's done a double round trip, right? It crashed 99% and now it's up 100x.

So it's pretty interesting again. And the reason it's interesting is that if you go through the numbers, they are making more than 100% of their pre-tax profit from gain on sale of loans, subprime loans, and gain on sale of equity stakes in other companies. And you X those two out, they're losing money.

And they're losing money now, right, after the rebound, after the restructuring from 2022, 2023. And this is a company that is being valued, again, as a secular growth stock that saw its used car revenues drop 30% between 2022 and 2023. So it's not necessarily a secular growth company. The accounting is abysmal. And then what people are really missing is that what's happening in subprime,

auto securitizations right now, and you can track it on your Bloomberg terminal, delinquencies are starting to skyrocket. Yeah, we actually did an episode on this recently with Jim Egan. Yeah. And so, again, a huge amount of their profits comes from selling, you know, generating paper from customers and then selling it in the open market or to affiliates.

And this is a company that was spun out of a company called DriveTime Finance, which is their affiliated finance company, which was originally called Ugly Duckling in the late 90s, which was run by the current CEO's father. And that company collapsed in the first subprime blowup, which was not the GFC. It was actually in the late 90s in subprime auto credit and consumer loans.

And it didn't go bankrupt, but it came close. And he had to restructure it. He bought it in private and then restructured it and renamed it DriveTime Finance. But that's the genesis of Carvana. That's its DNA. It's basically a subprime finance lead company, if you will. And those companies should not trade at

40 and 50 times expected earnings. And they don't, by and large. They're consumer finance companies. So it's an odd bird. It's still heavily leveraged. The stock is up a ton. But what really got us interested again recently

was the vast amount of insider selling that has just started in May and June in the company. If you go look at the insider selling in the company, it is just now a torrent of everybody selling like pretty much every day. And we just don't think that's a good sign given what's happening in the subprime securitization market. One area of the financial ecosystem that you've been cynical about

Kinnikos. Cynical about for a long time is private equity and a lot of the private assets. And something that I've been talking to some people about, and you hear people talk about, is not so much necessarily that the values have gone down, probably in many cases that they have, but that it's been a long time since...

LPs, et cetera, have gotten distributions, et cetera, whether it's at the venture level, the PE level. How long can that go on where it's like people are not getting cash out before it becomes a real problem? So I really kind of got much more interested in this area serving on a couple of big investment committees in Manhattan.

And one of which had a really, really huge slug of our assets of this nonprofit in privates, in private equity for the most part, a little bit of venture, a little bit of real estate. And

What always struck me was that we spent a lot of time talking about the market, talking about our managers, talking about why hedge funds were terrible. And then we'd get to the part about private, and they'd say, well, the returns are lagged by a quarter, so here they are, and let's move on. And I started looking at the numbers, and this was a fund that had all the premier firms, the ones you all know. And I said, yeah, gee, wow.

Stock market's doing awfully well, and we're kind of doing 10%, 11% in terms of realized returns, and then estimated IRR, which is problematic for reasons a lot of your audience knows. And is it just me, or are we not understanding we're leveraged long equity in these entities, and yet we're underperforming the indices? That was five, six years ago. And

Think that that's only gotten worse since and so I'm really beginning to wonder private equity was considered a panacea for nonprofits and foundations endowments because basically as my friend cliff Astin said it was Volatility, you know laundering if you will because no one ever showed you a big down quarter but now we're getting to the point where a lot of these funds are really mature and

And the actual returns themselves are not going to be mid-teens with low volatility. They're going to be high single digits, low double digits. And we can look at the S&P and say, OK, you know, I'm doing better in that and I'm liquid and I'm not paying fees.

So I suspect that private equity and ultimately private credit are going to be where hedge funds found themselves 10 to 15 years ago having to justify Their existence after having a pretty good run from the late 90s to the GFC I suspect that's where we are in private equity. It'll still be a very lucrative business and

But I just think it's golden days are over where it was just a free lunch of mid-team returns with no volatility. Does anyone ever ask you what you're bullish on? Should I ask? Look, we're long equities, right? We're long stuff. A lot of people in the audience are long. Give us an example. Well, I mean, we're long indices, so we're long equities.

General corporate America. I just you know, I just hate this stuff. I'm short I Thought you're supposed to get emotional every once in a while so it's uh, there's one other thing though I do want to mention and that is it was talking to someone earlier today and

And I think one of the things that's underappreciated by investors right now, and one of the things that's been most interesting to me is how corporate profit margins have held up, which used to be very mean reverting, as you know. And the more work we've done on this, the more we're kind of convinced that the capital spending boom we're seeing

Doodoo tech and specifically AI is is looking very much akin to the global internet build-up networking build-up in late 90s and the problem there of course is is that If you buy my chips from Nvidia or you were buying my networking equipment at Cisco and Lucent That's revenue for me and profit but for you it's capitalized expense, right? It's written off over time

And that has a big, big boost until people pull their orders. And that's what we saw in 2001, 2002, that GDP dropped about 1% to 2% in the recession of '01, '02. Does anybody know what corporate profits did? And that was an investment-driven recession. Consumers didn't feel it at all. Earnings were down about 45%, I think, from peak to trough in the S&P.

they were down about the same a little bit more in the global financial crisis but of course gdp collapsed so here's a little interesting thought experiment right now um nvidia's uh revenues are about one half of one percent of us gdp about 140 billion dollars and our gdp is about 29 trillion okay

Anyone tell me what Cisco and Lucent, the two companies that you needed when building out your Internet network in 99, 2000. Let me know what their combined revenues as percent of GDP was in 2000. No using your phones. It was a half a percent. It was it was roughly 50 billion dollars total on GDP of 10 trillion.

So those revenues stopped growing at some point shortly thereafter and actually shrunk a little bit. So the investment boom we're seeing right now, we've seen before. And it's not just chips, right? It's Caterpillar. It's people building the data centers. It's people building new utilities. I mean, there is an ecosystem around the AI boom that is considerable, as there was for TMT back in 99 and 2000.

But it is a riskier revenue stream because if people pull back, they can pull back capex very easily. Projects can get put on hold for six months or nine months, and that immediately increases

shows up in disappointing revenues and earnings forecasts if it happens. We're not there yet, but that's one of the risks out there that I think a lot of people are underestimating. So one of the reasons that we like talking to you, and a consistent thing that I've noticed in the almost 10 years of doing this podcast, it's always you learn a lot talking to people who are really steeped in accounting, and that people who are knowledgeable about accounting just

I don't know. They seem to have more interesting things to say than a lot of other people. Will AI be able to do accounting? Some of these sort of understandings of, you know, whatever, capitalized expenses and like, is this coming for the accounting profession? Well, about coming for the accounting profession, that's a good question.

I think that AI that we've seen and used is getting better and better at pulling numbers together and making sense of them. It's not quite there yet. When I've done it, I find lots and lots of errors. Not so much in the numbers themselves, but the implications of the numbers. The AI is still not getting that great, but it's going to, I think, ultimately. And the question will be for sort of tonight's conversation and keeping in the theme is,

Where we made a lot of money on the short side idiosyncratically after dot-com from sort of '03 to '09 were in analog businesses that saw their business digitize. So if you were selling an analog product that became digital, you were in a lot of trouble. Think like Kodak or Blockbuster, Yellow Pages, those kinds of businesses, right? That suddenly just didn't have to exist.

And there's going to be a raft of them post AI. And people are already kind of starting to think that through. But there will be industries that are collecting what I call agency rents that will suddenly not be able to collect those agency rents. And we're trying to keep an eye on that. But I do think that that.

The issue isn't so much the quantitative numbers that AI will be able to generate and give you ratios and things like that, although Bloomberg does a pretty good job of that already, right? Thank you. Databases. But interpreting it. And we're not there yet in terms of understanding what an increase in receivables are, three times revenues or increase in cost of goods sold relative to inventory. But it'll get there. It'll get there within the next couple of years.

So one of the things I always wanted to ask you was how you think about, I guess, the timeframes of some of your short bets, because it seems to me like, you know, we can sit here and talk about how crazy cap rates are for office buildings in New York and

Subprime loans and Carvana and how stupid Bitcoin Treasury companies are. Declining car sales at Tesla. That's right. And yet, you know, the key to all of this, to making the money on it, is actually calling what the catalyst is going to be and when the stock eventually falls. Yeah. After 40 years, I've kind of figured out that the catalysts are really evident pretty much in hindsight. Yeah.

That if the catalysts were that obvious, it would be priced into the stock.

And so you can look for signposts along the way, but they're just that. Now, there's some that are better than others. A massive increase in insider selling and executives leaving has always been a good one for the most part. It's probabilistic. But I think that timing is, you know, always like say, you know, only short the stocks that go down. If they don't go down, don't short them. And it's hard. And that's why being hedged pretty much systematically

to us made a lot of sense for the last 30 years um and say okay we're going to take the market out of what we're doing and we're going to just try to isolate the the idiosyncratic attributes of our shorts and even then i mean stuff you would think would bring a lower valuation out of common sense you know doesn't happen in in a bullion bull markets and in fact can be a negative factor you know the worse the company the the more it goes up

so you have to be willing to understand that concept as well but again it's it's it's funny you know equinex coming out of the blue just to use the example we've had tonight and stocked on 20 in two days

I mean, everything it said at Analyst Day was known to anybody who was paying attention. But yet they came out and said it and everybody went, oh, wow. Ouch. Speaking of executive departures, I think there was another one today at Tesla. Someone who was like, I think, pretty close to Elon or someone who had been there for a long time. Do you have a... Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Do you have a Tesla thought of the day? Nobody cares.

That's my thought nobody cares. Yeah, you could you know, you could see Elon, you know robbing a Brinks truck with a mask I'm sure they're gonna have a new business of robbing Brinks trucks and yeah We'll put it we'll put a trillion valuation on it I I've given up trying to figure out what people think about about executive departures at that company I mean their car sales are plummeting

their cash flows plummeting, you know, all the metrics that you would look as security analysts. But it's a unique animal where people say, oh, well, of course, yes. But, you know, Rosie, the robot's going to serve me my breakfast and it's going to Tesla trademark on it. So, you know, it's worth a trillion dollars. So there's always one stock in every bull market that has that at least that imprimatur of right of I call it hopes and dreams. Everyone can can

really project their hopes and dreams onto that company and then value it any way they want. And Cisco was that company, by the way, in '99. And it's undoubtedly Tesla because companies are actually executing in some of these fantastic areas of the future like Nvidia and others traded a discount to Tesla.

And they're actually doing things. He's just talking about doing things, but it doesn't matter, at least not yet, to get to your timing question. Jim Chanos, thank you so much. Always a thrill to chat with you. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. You can follow me at Traci Allaway. And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Jim Chanos. He's at Real Jim Chanos. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks.

For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots, where we have our daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots.

And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk to veteran investors like Jim Chanos, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. ♪

Thrivent can help you plan your finances for the people, causes, and community you love. What makes Thrivent different? Financial services and generosity programs are combined to help you build a financial roadmap for the future while also creating opportunities to give back along the way. Visit Thrivent.com to learn more. Thrivent, where money means more.

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