Vivek Ramaswamy-Backed Strive’s Bitcoin Bet Is Either Genius or a Ticking Time Bomb
Let’s get one thing straight. When a stock jumps over 27% on a Friday and then tacks on another 25% in pre-market trading on Monday, you’re not looking at a normal company (Why Vivek Ramaswamy-Backed Strive (ASST) Stock Is Surging Today). You’re looking at a fever dream. You’re watching a collective market seizure play out in real-time on your screen, the little green numbers blinking with a manic energy that feels both exhilarating and deeply, deeply unsettling.
That’s the story of Strive Inc. (ASST), the latest market darling co-founded by the ever-present Vivek Ramaswamy. This isn't your grandfather's blue-chip stock. This is a full-blown, high-octane crypto narrative wrapped in the thin veneer of a publicly traded company, and people are either going to get filthy rich or lose their damn shirts. There is no in-between.
I’ve been watching the `asst stock price` chart, and it looks less like a financial instrument and more like an EKG of a patient having a heart attack. It rockets to over $13, then plummets 80% after the company signals it might dilute the hell out of its shares, only to scream back to life on the whims of a few tweets. If this is the future of investing, then just hand me a bottle of whiskey and a blindfold.
The 'Berkshire Hathaway of Crypto' Gambit
So, what is Strive, exactly? The company’s origin story is already a head-scratcher. It was born from a merger between Strive Asset Management (Ramaswamy’s firm) and Asset Entities, a social media marketing company. An asset manager and a content delivery service. Right. That makes about as much sense as a Michelin-star chef opening a hot dog stand with a plumber. But hey, it’s 2025, and corporate synergy is apparently just throwing two random business models into a blender and hitting "puree."
Their grand plan is to become a "Digital Asset Treasury" (DAT). This is some Grade-A corporate jargon, so let me translate it for you: they buy a ton of Bitcoin and hold it. That’s pretty much it. They want to increase the "Bitcoin per share" on their balance sheet. They even announced an all-stock merger with Semler Scientific (SMLR), a biotech company that just so happens to be sitting on over half a billion dollars worth of BTC. They're basically hoovering up any company with a fat Bitcoin wallet.
This is a bold move. No, 'bold' is what you call it in a press release—this is a white-knuckle, bet-the-farm gamble. They're not building a better mousetrap or curing a disease. They're building a business model on pure, uncut volatility, and for some reason the market is rewarding them for it, which just goes to show...
The real kicker, the line that made me laugh out loud, comes from blockchain investor Ryan Watkins. He suggested that well-run Bitcoin treasury companies could become the "Berkshire Hathaway" of the crypto world. Give me a break. That’s like comparing a guy who wins a scratch-off ticket to Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway is built on decades of painstaking, fundamentals-driven analysis of productive businesses that actually make things. Strive’s model, so far, seems to be "buy Bitcoin and hope it goes up." One is a disciplined investment philosophy; the other is a leveraged bet on a single, notoriously wild asset. Is there even a real business here, or is it just a publicly traded wallet with a fancy mission statement? And what happens when the crypto winter inevitably comes back around?
Welcome to the Influencer Economy
If the underlying "strategy" wasn't wild enough, the recent price action for `asst stock` tells you everything you need to know about the state of the modern market. On October 24, a value investor named Mike Alfred announced on X (formerly Twitter) that he’d bought over a million shares (Strive shares soar 33% on Monday after Mike Alfred announced stake of over 1 million shares). Strive’s leadership, seeing this, did what any serious corporate entity would do: they immediately retweeted it.
The stock, offcourse, went absolutely bananas.
This is where we are now. A single tweet from a moderately well-known investor can add tens of millions of dollars to a company's market cap in a matter of hours. Forget earnings reports. Forget cash flow analysis. The only fundamental that seems to matter is social media clout. It’s a casino where the croupiers are influencers and the chips are meme stocks. It’s honestly exhausting. Why did I even bother learning about P/E ratios when I could have just been doomscrolling on my phone?
This social media-fueled pump stands in stark contrast to what happened just a month earlier, when the `asst stock` price collapsed after the company filed to register 1.28 billion new shares. The market, for a brief moment, remembered that share dilution is a thing and panicked. But that memory is short. A few bullish tweets later, and we're right back to the moon.
Let’s not forget the warning from Kaiko analyst Adam McCarthy, who pointed out that stocks like this often move four to five times more than Bitcoin itself. Think about that. A mild 5% dip in the `bitcoin price`—a completely normal Tuesday in crypto—could trigger a 20-25% bloodbath in `asst stock`. You’re not just buying volatility; you’re strapping yourself to a volatility multiplier. It’s financial Russian Roulette. Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe this is just how money works now, and I’m just too old-fashioned to get it.
This Isn't a Stock, It's a Casino Chip
Let's stop pretending. Strive Inc. isn't really a business in the traditional sense. It's a speculative vehicle, a proxy for a proxy, designed to capture the manic energy of the crypto market and channel it into a ticker symbol. The question in the headline is whether this is genius or a ticking time bomb. The answer is obvious: it’s a time bomb that looks like genius as long as the fuse is still burning. When the broader market turns, or when Bitcoin hits a rough patch, companies built on nothing but a pile of digital coins are going to be the first to go up in smoke. And all the retail investors who jumped in chasing the hype will be left holding an empty bag.
