Long before bitcoin came into existence, Ricardo Salinas Pliego was already absorbing lessons about sound money during family dinners at home.
Born in Mexico City in 1955, Salinas is the founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas, a sprawling conglomerate with businesses spanning telecommunications, media, financial services, and retail. In 1987, he succeeded his father as CEO of Grupo Elektra — a company originally established in 1906 by his great-grandfather as a furniture manufacturer — and pivoted its focus toward appliances, electronics, and consumer credit aimed at Mexico’s growing middle class.
Today, his business empire encompasses Banco Azteca, TV Azteca, and numerous other ventures operating across the country.
But Salinas’ views on money and finance were forged long before any of these achievements. He attributes his deep skepticism of fiat currency to the period when President Richard Nixon cut the U.S. dollar’s direct link to gold, effectively dismantling the gold standard.
“The discussions around the family dinner table, going way back, with my grandfather and my father always centered on gold,” he shared in a recent CoinDesk interview, noting that “the notorious fiat fraud carried out by Richard Nixon” was a recurring theme in household conversations. The Salinas family, with deep roots in gold and silver mining, had a direct financial stake in the matter.
Salinas: Bitcoin Cannot Be Seized
Those formative lessons solidified into firm conviction. For years, Salinas has maintained that bitcoin cannot be seized and can be sent anywhere in the world within seconds — qualities he considers superior to both fiat currencies and the gold standard, which he argues “has always been vulnerable to government interference.”
Salinas’ embrace of bitcoin was not sudden. His allocation to the asset has surged dramatically — climbing from just 10% of his investment portfolio in 2020 to 70% at present, a progression that reflects his steadily deepening belief in the cryptocurrency over the past five years.
In June 2021, Salinas publicly revealed he was collaborating with his bank, Banco Azteca, to become the first Mexican institution to accept bitcoin — a daring initiative that earned praise from the crypto community but triggered swift warnings from Mexican financial regulators regarding virtual assets. The banking plans ultimately stalled, yet his personal faith in bitcoin only intensified.
That same year, his appetite for bitcoin exposure led him into one of the more bizarre chapters of his financial life. Salinas aimed to invest $400 million in bitcoin in 2021 but lacked sufficient liquid funds, so he used his Grupo Elektra shares as collateral — pledging $416 million in stock to secure a $150 million loan.
His instincts about bitcoin proved right. The problem was that the lender turned out to be a scam: a company operating under the name Astor Capital Fund, whose CEO “Thomas Astor-Mellon” presented himself on a video call from what looked like a yacht, but was in fact a man with prior criminal convictions for forging prescriptions and stealing jewelry.
Even that costly experience failed to deter him. At Bitcoin 2022, Salinas delivered a keynote speech addressing what he refers to as the “fiat fraud” — his label for centralized institutions that promise to safeguard generational wealth while steadily eroding the purchasing power of their currencies. He told the audience his conviction was rooted in lived experience, not abstract theory: “There’s a difference between grasping a problem intellectually and having felt it firsthand in your own life.”
The 70% Allocation — and His Advice to Mortgage Your Home for Bitcoin
As of now, Salinas has allocated roughly 70% of his investment portfolio to BTC — a figure he discussed during his CoinDesk interview.
That allocation far exceeds what most financial advisors would ever recommend. But Salinas has never been one to follow conventional thinking. So confident is he in BTC’s long-term potential that he even persuaded his own wife to follow suit.
“I realize this is a divisive suggestion, but I convinced my wife to take out a mortgage on her home and use the loan proceeds to purchase bitcoin,” he said. And she followed through.
He encourages everyday investors to think along the same lines. “For the majority of people, their largest asset, their financial safety net, is the equity in their home,” he said. “Figure out a way to convert some or all of that into bitcoin exposure, whether on a large or small scale.”
His reasoning rests on a simple historical comparison. In January 2016, bitcoin was trading around $400 while the average home in Central London cost approximately $1.6 million — equivalent to about 4,000 bitcoin. With London property prices largely unchanged a decade later, that same home would now cost fewer than 30 bitcoin. For Salinas, that comparison alone makes the case.
“It’s an asymmetric bet skewed to the upside,” he told CoinDesk. “The more people who learn about bitcoin, the greater the demand will become.”
When pressed on the price forecasts of prominent bitcoin advocates like Cathie Wood and Michael Saylor — both of whom have suggested bitcoin could eventually hit seven figures — Salinas kept his response notably concise.
“So it will reach a million dollars,” he said. “I just can’t say exactly when.”
