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In his liquid portfolio, Ricardo Salinas does not hold stocks. He does not hold bonds. The founder and president of Grupo Salinas told Coindesk’s Jennifer Sanasie and Ollie Acuna that his liquid investment portfolio is now 80% bitcoin after he bought aggressively during the recent price dip.
Key Takeaways
- Ricardo Salinas remarked that he holds 80% of his liquid portfolio in bitcoin, up from 70%, after buying during the latest dip.
- Grupo Elektra disburses $500M weekly in remittances; Coinpro is building a stablecoin rail with Anchorage Digital.
- Salinas told Coindesk he may run for Mexico’s presidency in 2030, with fiscal reform as the stated priority.
“As soon as I get my hands on some fiat, I turn it into bitcoin,” Salinas told the pair in a wide-ranging Coindesk interview published on June 17.
80% Bitcoin, No Regrets
Salinas clarified a figure that has circulated widely online. He does not hold 70% of his total wealth in bitcoin. That number applies specifically to his liquid, financial portfolio, excluding businesses, real estate, aircraft, and other hard assets.
“Of the financial portfolio that I manage, I don’t have stocks, I don’t have bonds,” he said. “I have bitcoin, bitcoin miners, very few, and gold and silver miners.”
He added that, during the recent dip, he moved from roughly 70% bitcoin to 80%, with the remaining 20% in gold and silver mining equities.
How He Got Here
Salinas, born in 1955, grew up in a household where the Nixon shock of 1971 dominated dinner-table conversation. His grandfather and father were gold advocates who tracked the U.S. dollar’s departure from convertibility as a sign of what he calls the “fiat fraud.”
Bitcoin entered his orbit in 2013, introduced at a conference in New York City when the price sat somewhere between $200 and $400. At first, he treated it like a tradeable security.
“After some time and some education, I decided that this was not just another security that you should hold and then resell,” he said. “This was something different. It was a new and better, much better form of money.”
While speaking with Coindesk’s Sanasie and Acuna, he credited “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous with cementing his view that bitcoin outperforms gold as a monetary asset.
His Advice to Ordinary Investors
Salinas endorsed dollar-cost averaging for retail investors, pointing to the IRA structure in the United States as an obvious vehicle for bitcoin exposure.
He went further: “For most people, their biggest investment, their nest egg is their home equity. Find a way to transform that into some kind of bitcoin exposure.”
He confirmed he persuaded his wife to mortgage a property she owns and deploy the loan proceeds into bitcoin, describing the position as being long a real asset while short a depreciating fiat currency at the same time.
His holding advice is straightforward: “As soon as you get some fiat and you want to get rid of it, instead of buying some stuff, buy some bitcoin and store it, and don’t look at it.”
He compared the approach to real estate: nobody checks their home’s market price every morning.
On Price Targets and Michael Saylor
Asked whether he believes Cathie Wood and Michael Saylor’s projections of $1.5 million Bitcoin by 2030 or 2031, Salinas endorsed the direction without the precision.
“It will be a million dollars, but I don’t know when,” he told the show hosts.
He praised Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) vehicle, specifically the STRC preferred stock that pays 11.5% in dollars, calling it an obvious alternative for investors still operating in a fiat framework and earning 4% to 5% on traditional fixed income.
He rejected AI stocks outright. “I would never buy the AI bubble. It is way overpriced for my conservative, Buffett-style value investment.”
Remittances, Stablecoins, and Anchorage
Grupo Elektra pays out $500 million per week in peso-denominated remittances across its retail store network, representing approximately half of all U.S.-to-Mexico remittance disbursements. The annual flow runs between $50 billion and $60 billion, with roughly 80% of Mexican remittances still paid out in physical cash.
Salinas explained that his firm, through its Coinpro unit, is working with Anchorage Digital to build a stablecoin-based payment rail connecting the U.S. and Mexico. He described it as a practical improvement over the current system rather than a philosophical commitment to stablecoins.
“ Stablecoin is just another token,” he remarked during the interview. “A stablecoin and a bank deposit, a digital bank deposit is the same” thing. He added that dollar stablecoins are primarily convenient for the U.S. government as a financing mechanism, not for the people who use them.
His preferred long-term solution is different:
“The best way to think about it is to go into bitcoin and then settle locally.”
Mexico’s Crypto Standoff
Banco Azteca, the Grupo Salinas banking subsidiary with 32 million active depositors and 150 million weekly transactions, cannot offer any crypto services. The Bank of Mexico has issued standing orders prohibiting licensed banks from touching tokenized or crypto assets.
Salinas attributed the prohibition to a government with structural incentives to suppress crypto adoption, arguing that officials rely on cash and informal-economy dynamics to avoid tax collection accountability. He did not soften the assessment.
“They are absolutely incapable, corrupt, and a bunch of liars,” he said of the current administration.
A 2030 Presidential Run
Salinas acknowledged, for the first time during the Coindesk interview, that he may seek the Mexican presidency in 2030. He framed it as a last resort.
“If there’s no other way out, unfortunately I’ll have to take the responsibility,” he said. He described his current concern as preserving conditions so that his children and grandchildren do not have to relocate to Miami or Madrid.
Whether a Salinas presidency would shift Mexico’s regulatory posture on bitcoin is a question his interview raised without answering.
English (US) ·