Long before bitcoin existed, Ricardo Salinas Pliego he was learning about hard money at the family dinner table.
Born in Mexico City in 1955, Salinas is the founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas, a conglomerate with interests in telecommunications, media, financial services, and marketing. In 1987, he took over from his father as CEO of Grupo Elektra – a family-owned furniture company founded in 1906 by his grandfather – and focused on electronics, electronics, and consumer credit in emerging Mexico.
Today, his empire includes Banco Azteca, TV Azteca, and many other businesses around the world.
But Salinas’s financial acumen was formed well before that. He traces his deep belief in the devaluation of fiat to the time when President Richard Nixon cut off the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, the end of the gold standard.
“Discussions at the family table, back in the day, with my grandparents and my father were always golden,” he told CoinDesk recently. interviewadding that “the notorious fiat fraud by Richard Nixon” was a regular topic of conversation at home. The Salinas family, a longtime gold and silver miner, had a keen eye for the game.
Salinas: Bitcoin is impossible
The first lessons hardened the conviction. Salinas has been debated for years that bitcoin is immutable and can be transferred instantly around the world – an advantage that he considers superior to all fiat currencies and gold, which he says “have always been influenced by the government.”
Salinas didn’t get into bitcoin all at once. Its distribution of bitcoin has grown significantly – from only 10% of the amount invested in 2020. up to 70% todaya strategy that shows its economic impact over a decade.
In June 2021, Salinas publicly announced that he was working with his bank, Banco Azteca, to become the first in Mexico to accept bitcoin – a bold move that led to widespread applause and a swift dismissal from Mexico’s financial authorities, who issued it. warnings of real property. The banking ambitions stopped, but his passion only grew.
That same year, his hunger for bitcoin exposure made him one of the most unusual things in his financial career. Salinas wanted to invest $400 million in bitcoin in 2021 but had no liquid funds available, so he borrowed from his shares in Grupo Elektra – pledging $416 million as collateral for a $150 million loan.
His views on bitcoin were correct. The only problem is that the borrower turned out to be a fraud: a company that calls itself Astor Capital Fund, whose CEO “Thomas Astor-Mellon” presented himself in a video that looked like a yacht, but in fact he was a person with previous convictions for forgery and jewelry theft.
Even the painful experience did not discourage him. At Bitcoin 2022, Salinas gave a speech detailing what he calls “mass fraud” – his term for the middlemen who assure users of a large amount of wealth and quietly destroy their spending power. He told the crowd that what he believed was personal, not just a fantasy: “It’s one thing to understand an imaginary problem, and another to have it on your skin.”
70% bet – this is why you should mortgage your house to buy Bitcoin
As of today, Salinas has invested about 70% of his investment in BTC – a figure he discussed with CoinDesk.
The distribution is below what most financial advisors would agree. But Salinas has never been an ordinary genius. He is so convinced that BTC is so high that he forced his wife to do something about it.
“I know this is a controversial topic, but I encouraged my wife to mortgage the house she owns and take out a loan to buy bitcoin,” he said. And he did.
They want ordinary investors to think the same way. “For most people, the biggest investment, their nest egg, is their home,” he said. “Find a way to convert this to a different type of bitcoin to be bigger or smaller.”
His argument is based on a direct comparison of history. In January 2016, bitcoin was close to $ 400 and an apartment in Central London costs about $ 1.6 million – about 4,000 bitcoin. With London property prices having changed little over a decade, the same house would now cost less than 30 bitcoins. For Salinas, that comparison is all the proof anyone needs.
“It’s a medium-sized bet,” he told CoinDesk. “The more people know about bitcoin, the more demand there will be.”
When asked about the price predictions of BTC bulls like Cathie Wood and Michael Saylor – who said that bitcoin could eventually reach seven figures – Salinas was very brief.
“So it’s going to be a million dollars,” he said. “I don’t know when.”
