Gi00ts

One year ago today, I wrote this after Charlie Kirk was murdered. Two days later, Strive became a public company. It was one of the biggest moments of my professional life, and yet I could not get my mind off Charlie, his family, and what his life had meant to mine. If you look back at what I was talking about publicly during those days, it was mostly about Charlie, because that was where my mind and heart were, and it felt inauthentic to spend that moment talking only about Strive. During COVID, my wife and I were living in Northern California. @GavinNewsom had deemed churches “non-essential” and ordered them closed while “peaceful protests” were encouraged. In May 2020, @destinyrocklin church, which was close to where we lived at the time, opened its doors in defiance of those orders. We believed at the time that its pastor could potentially be arrested for taking that stand. He did not care, and neither did the people who filled that building, including my wife and me. We were there because church is essential and because nothing is more important than our faith in Christ. We had never been to Destiny and probably never would have walked through its doors that weekend without Charlie. We heard on The Charlie Kirk Show that he would be there supporting the church, so my wife and I went. We found a church full of Christians on fire for God, unafraid to live their faith publicly, and that experience helped set my family on the Christian journey we have been on ever since. It also directly gave my wife and me the conviction to take a stand against the ramifications of ESG and DEI, which we came to believe represented not only breaches of fiduciary duty, but a broader cultural movement increasingly hostile to Christian conviction. We would not be where we are in our Christian journey without Charlie, and I am certain I would not be at Strive without Charlie Kirk. When Strive was founded in 2022, Charlie was a seed investor. He supported Strive from the beginning in its fight against ESG and DEI, and he was excited about Strive’s evolution into a Bitcoin-focused company. Charlie understood that these fights were about much more than markets or business, and his energy and conviction were unmistakable. I spend a lot of time talking about Bitcoin, the debt crisis, markets and Strive, and I have always promised myself that I will be authentic about what is actually on my mind and speak what I believe to be true. I could not live my life any other way. Make no mistake about what sits beneath all of it for me: Christ comes first. My faith is my foundation, my inspiration and ultimately my why. Charlie blessed this country with an extraordinary amount of energy during a tragically short life. It is fitting to me that his final book was about honoring the Sabbath. Of all the subjects Charlie could have chosen to write about, his final message pointed people back toward God. A year later, what I wrote that day remains true: Charlie changed my family’s life, and his legacy lives on in our home and in countless others. We will never forget Charlie Kirk.