Eric Trump shared details of a meeting with Michael Saylor, co-founder and Executive Chairman of MicroStrategy, at Mar-a-Lago.
Setting the tone, in a post on X, Eric Trump, Executive Vice President of The Trump Organization, described the meeting as “Two friends, one passion: Bitcoin”, on Jan. 3. Their interaction speaks to growing ties between big-name people in business and the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem amid the rising prominence of cryptocurrency in elite circles.
The meeting and its attendant opinions come in the wake of increasing interest in BTC within the Trump sphere. Trump is intensifying his public alignment with BTC advocates such as Saylor.
Trump also has connections to World Liberty Financial, which provides users with crypto trading services, DeFi solutions, blockchain innovation, and crypto education. The incoming president’s son also publicly showed support for crypto on his X on Aug. 7, where he said the 40-year-old said he has “truly fallen in love with Crypto / DeFi.” While he often presents himself as a business influencer, Trump’s presence adds visibility to World Liberty Financial. The firm’s goal is to make “DeFi broadly accessible”, said Trump on the two-hour X live stream on Sept. 16, 2024.
Saylor is among the most influential figures in crypto, known for his early and aggressive buy-in on BTC as a corporate treasury asset. Saylor has consistently been a staunch advocate of BTC as a store of value over the long term, a much-needed hedge against the unabated rise of inflation for fiat currencies.
Under Saylor’s headship, MicroStrategy became the best-performing crypto stock of 2024, establishing it as one of the biggest institutional holders of BTC. However, the stock prices soon tanked under $300 on Dec 31. Saylor also found himself under fire as many analysts called his Bitcoin 21/21 goal “not credible”.
However, Saylor does not seem to be affected by the panning and has been meeting up with Eric Trump to stay put with his plans of buying $42 billion in BTC in the next three years. The meeting between Trump and Saylor represents how traditional business leaders are opening up to coalesce around the growing ecosystem of cryptocurrencies.
