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 firm, announced it purchased 6,182 Bitcoins last week at a total cost of $511.4 million, bringing its total Bitcoin holdings to 43,000.

Apart from Strategy, which holds more than 840,000 Bitcoins and enjoys an insurmountable lead, Strive, which went public via a merger in September 2025, is only around 500 Bitcoins and 1,000 Bitcoins behind third-place Twenty One Capital and second-place Metaplanet in terms of holdings, respectively.

Based on data from the past month, Strive could achieve its goal of becoming the second-largest Bitcoin Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) as early as next week, well before its original target of year-end.

Strive pursues an extremely aggressive strategy to accumulate Bitcoin. Both firms raise funds via preferred stock financing, yet Strive even beat Strategy to achieve cash dividend payouts on every trading day.

Both companies aim to increase Bitcoin holdings per share, but the underlying belief is starkly different: Strategy founder Michael Saylor believes in Bitcoin itself, while Strive's current CEO Matt Cole believes in nothing but money.

"Extreme Capitalism"

In 2022, Vivek Ramaswamy founded Strive with his high school classmate Anson Frericks. Its early investor roster included iconic figures from the "PayPal Mafia": Peter Thiel, 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 had no initial ties to crypto at all: it launched as an anti-ESG asset management firm that openly benchmarked itself against BlackRock, advocating for shareholder primacy and opposing large institutions using client funds 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 transformed drug development models via technology acquisitions and successfully drove the IPOs of multiple major biotech firms including Axovant and Myovant, amassing a huge personal fortune.

Around 2020, Vivek Ramaswamy emerged as a leading voice of US conservatism, published the bestseller *Woke, Inc.*, and became a sharp critic of "woke capitalism".

So-called "woke capitalism" refers to a relatively moderate form of capitalism. As noted earlier, ESG is the abbreviation for Environmental, Social, and Governance — a framework that holds capitalism should bear certain social responsibilities, and account for broader public interests across environmental protection, human rights, and corporate governance.

But in Vivek Ramaswamy's view, these initiatives are as much meaningless political correctness as LGBTQ-related advocacy, and he believes the sole goal of running a company is to maximize shareholder value, with all other concerns irrelevant to business operations.

Put simply, Vivek Ramaswamy believes in pure capitalism: as long as an action generates profit, it can and should be pursued without moral or operational red lines.

While this worldview sounds extreme, it is entirely beneficial to the core goal of making money. In February 2023, he stepped down as Strive's executive chairman to launch a presidential run, later pivoting to a campaign for Ohio governor, leaving behind an anti-woke asset management firm with $2–3 billion in ETF assets under management.

Perhaps he concluded the company could not deliver on his vision, so he chose to pursue politics instead. And his successor is even more uncompromising in this worldview than he was.

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

His successor Matt Cole pushed the company to an even more extreme position.

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

According to Cole's own account, during his internship in 2000, he watched CalPERS divest from tobacco stocks against the investment team's recommendations, a move that cost the fund $3.581 billion in missed returns over the next 18 years. Later, when the fund joined the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), he felt forced to "make every decision through an ESG lens", noting that green bonds carried higher prices than regular bonds of equivalent risk, and argued this approach betrayed the trust invested in the fund by public sector retirees' pension contributions.

For him, when the pension savings of his parents, uncles, grandfather, and other family members and friends were held in the fund, the only thing he could and should do was maximize returns to help them enjoy a secure retirement.

This sense of responsibility is laudable: early in his tenure, when the fund faced a funding shortfall, Cole even led a turnaround to fill the gap. But it is possible that this unwavering commitment to his responsibility is exactly what pushed him gradually toward extreme positions.

Cole has noted that, as someone with a background in asset management, he is used to making decisions based on hurdle rates — the minimum required return for capital allocation. During his time at CalPERS, the hurdle rate was set by bond index performance; now, for his company, Bitcoin itself is the hardest hurdle rate to beat. He has stated, "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% over 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 maximize our Bitcoin exposure."

Back in 2016, Cole invested the majority of his net worth into Bitcoin. After an in-depth conversation with Michael Saylor, Cole realized his vision was still too narrow: Bitcoin represents the purest expression of capitalism, elitism, innovation, and financial freedom, meaning it was not enough for him to hold Bitcoin personally — the company needed to hold it too.

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

Extreme Positions Do Not Preclude Profitability

Capital markets do not judge actions as right or wrong.

Both companies have staked their entire business on Bitcoin, but the core beliefs of Strategy founder Michael Saylor and Cole are worlds apart. Saylor's narrative is rooted in monetary systems: he argues that fiat currencies are continuously eroded by inflation and debt, and that Bitcoin is a superior monetary system. He talks of monetary value and digital property, framing Bitcoin accumulation as a long-term effort to replace the existing fiat currency order.

Cole's narrative, by contrast, is rooted in capital allocation. He barely discusses whether Bitcoin will replace the US dollar as a currency, and only cares if it is the highest-return asset available. For him, Bitcoin is not a new form of money — it is a benchmark, a hurdle, a yield stream that can be amplified infinitely via preferred stock leverage. He sums up the company's mission in a single phrase: hold a permanent long position in Bitcoin, and a permanent short position in the US dollar.

From another perspective, if an asset emerges in the future with reliably higher returns than Bitcoin, Cole would likely shift his focus to that asset without a moment's hesitation.

Strategy and Strive follow fundamentally different logics for Bitcoin accumulation, but their goals and outcomes are nearly identical. In fact, Cole — who boasts decades of industry experience and once single-handedly closed a pension fund gap — has proven more sophisticated in his execution: from going public via reverse takeover, to raising PIPE financing, to acquiring Semler Scientific, to structuring preferred stock financing after sorting out debt obligations, he pioneered daily interest payouts and launched the Bitcoin purchasing program without incurring meaningful debt.

Since September, research firms covering Strive including TD Cowen, B. Riley, Maxim Group, and StoneX have all issued buy ratings for the firm. From a profit-making perspective, your ideological stance does not matter — your execution capability does. Strive has delivered on market expectations, growing from zero to a position where it is securing a top-two spot while competing for the top rank in just one year.

Strive does not evangelize, 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 holder of Bitcoin, Bitcoin has seemingly shifted from being a challenger of the old system, to a sharp weapon wielded by status-quo players to push back against reformist capitalist movements.