Long before Bitcoin existed, Ricardo Salinas Plejo 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 retail. In 1987, he took over from his father as CEO of Grupo Elektra – originally a family-owned furniture manufacturing company founded by his great-grandfather in 1906 – and refocused it on appliances, electronics and consumer credit for Mexico’s emerging middle class.
Today, his empire includes Banco Azteca, TV Azteca and dozens of other companies spread across the country.
But Salinas’ financial philosophy was shaped long before all that. He traces his deep belief in the devaluation of paper currency to the era when President Richard Nixon cut off the direct convertibility of the US dollar into gold, ending the gold standard.
“The conversation at the family table, back then, with my grandfather and father was always about gold,” he told CoinDesk in a recent interview. interviewAdding that “Richard Nixon’s famous paper fraud” was a constant topic of discussion at home. The Salinas family, long involved in gold and silver mining, had direct involvement in the game.
Salinas: Bitcoin cannot be seized
Those early lessons turned into conviction. Salinas It has been argued for years Bitcoin is non-seizureable and instantly transferable around the world — advantages he sees over both paper money and the gold standard, which he says “has always been subject to government interference.”
Salinas didn’t come up with Bitcoin all at once. Bitcoin allocation has grown significantly – from just 10% of his portfolio in 2020 To 70% todaya path that reflects his deep conviction in the original over half a decade.
In June 2021, Salinas publicly announced that he was working with his bank, Banco Azteca, to make it the first bank in Mexico to accept Bitcoin — a bold move that drew praise from the cryptocurrency community and a quick response from Mexican financial regulators, who issued Warnings About virtual assets. His banking ambitions stalled, but his personal conviction increased.
That same year, his thirst for exposure to Bitcoin led him to one of the strange episodes of his financial career. Salinas wanted to invest $400 million in bitcoin in 2021 but didn’t have the cash readily available, so he borrowed against his shares in Grupo Elektra — pledging $416 million as collateral for a $150 million loan.
His instincts about Bitcoin were correct. The only problem was that the lender turned out to be a fraud: a company calling itself Astor Capital Fund, whose CEO Thomas Astor Mellon introduced himself on a video call from what looked like a yacht, but was actually a man with previous convictions for forging prescriptions and stealing jewelry.
Even that painful incident did not shake him. At Bitcoin 2022, Salinas gave a keynote speech in which he discussed what he calls “fiat fraud” — his term for centralized institutions that guarantee users generational wealth while quietly destroying the purchasing power of their currency. He told the audience that his conviction is personal and not theoretical: “Understanding a theoretical problem is one thing, and living it in your skin is another thing.”
The 70% Bet – And Why You Should Mortgage Your House to Buy Bitcoin
As of today, Salinas has nearly 70% of his investment portfolio placed in Bitcoin — a number he discussed in the interview with CoinDesk.
The customization dwarfs what most wealth advisors would acknowledge. But Salinas has never been one for conventional wisdom. He is so convinced of BTC’s long-term superiority that he convinced his wife to act.
“I know this is a controversial topic, but I convinced my wife to mortgage the house she owns and get a loan to buy Bitcoin,” he said. And I did.
He wants ordinary investors to think likewise. “For most people, the biggest investment, their nest egg, is their home equity,” he said. “Find a way to turn that into some sort of exposure to Bitcoin to a larger or smaller extent.”
His argument is based on A Clear historical comparison In January 2016, the price of Bitcoin was approaching $400, and the average cost of a home in central London was around $1.6 million – about 4,000 Bitcoins. With London property prices changing little after a decade, the same house now costs less than 30 bitcoins. For Salinas, this comparison is all the evidence anyone needs.
“It’s an asymmetric bet on the upside,” he told CoinDesk. “The more people know about Bitcoin, the greater the demand for it.”
When asked about the price predictions of fellow Bitcoin bulls like Cathie Wood and Michael Saylor — who have suggested that Bitcoin could eventually reach seven figures — Salinas was uncharacteristically terse.
“So the amount will be a million dollars,” he added. “I just don’t know when.”
