As an extreme capitalist, Matt Cole only believes in profits and returns.

Written by Eric, Foresight News

On the evening of October 26 Beijing time, Strive, a Bitcoin treasury company, announced that it purchased 6,182 Bitcoins last week at a cost of $511.4 million, bringing its total Bitcoin holdings to 43,000.

Aside from Strategy, which holds over 840,000 Bitcoins and boasts an insurmountable lead, Strive, which went public via merger in September 2025, trails the third-ranked Twenty One Capital and second-ranked Metaplanet in holdings by only around 500 and 1,000 Bitcoins respectively.

Based on data from the past month, Strive’s goal of becoming the second-largest Bitcoin DAT by the end of this year may be achieved as early as next week.

Strive’s approach to hoarding Bitcoin is highly aggressive. Despite both companies using preferred stock financing, Strive even beat Strategy to launching cash dividend payments on every working day.

While both aim to increase Bitcoin holdings per share, Strategy founder Michael Saylor believes in Bitcoin itself, whereas Strive’s current CEO Matt Cole believes in nothing but money.

"Extreme Capitalism"

Strive was founded in 2022 by Vivek Ramaswamy and his high school classmate Anson Frericks. Its list of early investors includes Peter Thiel, a leading figure of the "PayPal Mafia" and co-founder of top venture capital firm Founders Fund, current US Vice President JD Vance, and billionaire investor Bill Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital. The company’s original positioning had nothing to do with cryptocurrency: it was an anti-ESG asset management firm that openly benchmarked against BlackRock, advocated for shareholder primacy, and opposed large institutions using client money to advance ESG and DEI agendas.

Vivek Ramaswamy is an Indian-American who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard University. In 2014, he founded biotech firm Roivant Sciences, which revamped drug development models through technology acquisitions and successfully led multiple large biotech IPOs (including those of Axovant, Myovant, etc.), accumulating a massive fortune for him.

Around 2020, Vivek Ramaswamy emerged as a leading opinion leader for US conservatives, and published the bestseller *Woke, Inc.*, in which he fiercely criticized "woke capitalism".

The so-called "woke capitalism" refers to a more moderate form of capitalism. As mentioned earlier, ESG is the abbreviation for Environmental, Social, and Governance, a framework that argues capitalism should bear certain social responsibilities and balance the overall interests of society in areas such as environmental protection, human rights, and corporate governance.

But in Vivek Ramaswamy’s view, this, like LGBTQ-related advocacy, falls under "meaningless political correctness". He believes that the only goal of running a company is to maximize shareholder interests, and everything else is irrelevant to business operations.

Put simply, Vivek Ramaswamy believes in the purest form of capitalism: as long as it makes money, there can and should be no bottom line.

While this ideology may sound extreme, it is entirely beneficial for the core goal of "making money". In February 2023, he stepped down as executive chairman of Strive to run for US president, and later shifted his campaign to run for Governor of Ohio, leaving behind an anti-woke asset management firm that oversees ETFs worth roughly $2 to $3 billion.

Perhaps he believed the company could not realize his vision, so he chose to enter politics. His successor, however, took this ideology even further than he did.

"If You Can’t Outperform Bitcoin, Just Buy Bitcoin"

The successor who took over, Matt Cole, pushed the company to another extreme.

Matt Cole worked for around 15 years at CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the US, where he became the youngest portfolio manager in the fund’s history, overseeing roughly $70 billion in fixed income assets.

According to Matt Cole’s own account, during his internship in 2000, he witnessed CalPERS divest from tobacco stocks against the investment team’s recommendations, a move that led to $3.581 billion in lost returns over the following 18 years. Later, after the fund joined the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), he felt forced to "make all decisions through an ESG filter", noting that green bonds were more expensive than regular bonds with the same risk profile, which he believed betrayed the trust of public servants’ retirement savings.

For him, when the retirement savings of his parents, uncles, grandfather, and other relatives and friends are held in this fund, the only thing he can and should do is help them have more money to enjoy their later years.

This responsible attitude is commendable, and in the early days when the fund faced funding gaps, Matt Cole even pulled off a turnaround to fill those shortfalls. But it is unclear whether this overly strong sense of responsibility is precisely what led him to gradually move toward extremes.

Matt Cole once stated that, as someone with an asset management background, he is accustomed to making decisions based on the "hurdle rate" (the minimum return requirement for capital allocation). During his time at CalPERS, the hurdle rate was the bond index; now for his company, Bitcoin itself is the hardest hurdle rate to outperform. He once said, "If you don’t think you can outperform Bitcoin, just buy Bitcoin directly. Since we believe Bitcoin will deliver an average annualized return of over 30%!, (MISSING) in the next 10 to 15 years, the best approach is to use Bitcoin as the benchmark for all capital allocation decisions, and find ways to amplify our exposure to Bitcoin."

Back in 2016, Matt Cole invested most of his net worth in Bitcoin. After a lengthy, in-depth talk with Michael Saylor, Matt Cole realized his vision was still too narrow: Bitcoin is the purest expression of capitalism, elitism, innovation, and financial freedom, and it is not enough for him to buy it personally — he needed the company to buy it too.

In September 2025, Strive went public via reverse merger, officially kicking off its aggressive Bitcoin buying spree.

Being Extreme Does Not Mean Unprofitable

The capital market does not judge right or wrong.

While both companies have bet their entire business on Bitcoin, the core philosophy of Strategy founder Michael Saylor is completely different from Cole’s. Saylor’s narrative is monetary in nature: he believes fiat currencies are being continuously diluted by inflation and debt, that Bitcoin is a superior monetary system. He talks about monetary energy and digital property, framing Bitcoin hoarding as a long-term practice to replace the existing fiat currency order with Bitcoin.

Matt Cole’s narrative, by contrast, is focused on capital allocation. He barely talks about whether Bitcoin can replace the US dollar as a currency, and only cares whether it is the highest-return asset. For him, Bitcoin is not a new currency, but a benchmark, a hurdle, a rate of return that can be infinitely amplified through preferred stock leverage. He sums up the company’s core mission in one sentence: go long Bitcoin permanently, and go short the US dollar.

From another perspective, if some asset with a higher, more certain return than Bitcoin emerges in the future, Matt Cole would likely shift his focus without a moment’s hesitation.

Strategy and Strive have different underlying logics for hoarding Bitcoin, but their goals and outcomes are nearly identical. In fact, Cole, with over a decade of industry experience and a track record of single-handedly filling pension fund gaps, is even more seasoned: from going public via reverse merger, to securing PIPE financing, to acquiring Semler Scientific, to launching preferred stock financing after sorting out its debt profile, pioneering daily interest payments, and kicking off its Bitcoin purchase process without taking on material debt.

Since September, institutions covering Strive including TD Cowen, B. Riley, Maxim Group, and StoneX have all given the stock a "buy" rating. From a profit-making perspective, your stance does not matter — your capability does. Strive has lived up to expectations, rocketing from zero to a position of "securing second place, vying for first" in just one year.

Strive does not preach, does not talk about decentralized ideals, and only reports Bitcoin holdings per share and leverage multiples during earnings calls. When a company that executes capitalism to its extreme becomes the world’s second-largest corporate Bitcoin holder, Bitcoin seems to have shifted from being a challenger of the old system, to a sharp weapon wielded by defenders of the status quo against movements to reform capitalism.