Billy Bund

Do you have a $1 bill in your pocket? What if you want to send that $1 bill to your friend on the opposite side of the world? You probably won’t be able to Venmo them, or send them a wire or ACH. 

So how do you send your friend the $1 bill? Easy. Exchange your $1 bill for 1 Tether. Press a button in your cryptocurrency wallet of choice, and your friend will have your $1 within seconds.

Tether is likely the most efficient way to send money anywhere around the world instantly and for low fees. There is no question that Tether is great for the people who use it, but do you know who Tether is also great for? The people who founded it. And that is quite an understatement. 

In fact, Tether is arguably the greatest business EVER created. More profitable than any Wall Street bank, hedge fund, AI company, tech company. Any endeavor ever created… By a long shot. 

Tether is INSANELY profitable. So profitable that it wouldn’t surprise me if the main founder, Giancarlo Devasini, is the world’s first trillionaire. 

How does Tether make money and why is it so profitable?

Every time you exchange a $1 bill in your pocket for 1 Tether, what happens to your $1 bill? Well, a company called iFinex (the maker of Tether) takes your $1 bill and invests it into safe investments like U.S. Treasury Bills that return about 5% per year. Your original $1 bill sits invested in the U.S. Treasury Bills until you need your money back. 

What happens if you need your $1 bill one year from now? Well your $1 bill is now actually worth $1.05 ($1 with a 5% return is $1.05). Tether gives your $1 bill back, but keeps the extra $0.05.

This doesn’t sound like the greatest business ever, does it? Not at first glance. But when you take into account that Tether has over $167B under its roof. The profits start to add up fast. SO FAST. 

$167B at a 5% return means Tether will collect $8.35B per year just by investing in U.S. Treasury Bills. In reality, Tether invests in U.S. Treasury Bills as well as other higher returning investments that help boost the return it gets. 

For example, in 2024, Tether made $14B in profits. The math on this is ludicrous. $14B in profits = $269M per week = $38M per day… In just the time it has taken you to read this far, Tether has made about $53,000 in profit. 

Ok, great. But why are you saying Tether is the most profitable business ever? Sure $14B in profit is a lot of money. However, Goldman Sachs made $14.3B in profit last year. Google made over $100B in profit last year. 

The really incredible thing about Tether, and why it will go down as the greatest business ever created in human history, is because Tether made $14B in profit with just 100 employees.

Let that sink in for a second. Goldman Sachs made the same amount of profit with 46,500 full-time employees. Google had over 183,000 full-time employees. If you include contractors, consultants and other people who aren’t considered full-time employees, Goldman/Google’s employee counts are actually much higher. 

It’s easy to see how much more profitable per employee Tether is than Goldman Sachs, Google, any company you want to pick. No company is even remotely close in terms of profit per employee. 

Tether 2024 profit per employee: $14B / 100 employees = $140,000,000 per employee

Goldman Sachs: $14.3B / 46,500 = $308,000 per employee 

Google: $100B / 183,000 = $546,000 per employee 

Again. Goldman/Google’s profit per employee is much lower than the above calculations if you include people like contractors and consultants that they don’t count as full-time employees. 

If you’re still not convinced, hear me out. Let’s look at the time it takes each firm to make $1M from one of its employees:

Tether: ~3 days

Goldman: ~3 years 

Google: ~2 years 

Said another way, Tether is an absolutely disgusting money making machine. This begs the question: “how much would Tether be worth if it went public?”

Tether’s valuation as a public company

This is a relatively simple calculation. Circle, the issuer of Tether competitor USDC, went public several months ago. Circle is about 1/3 the size of Tether, has to pay out 50% of its profits to Coinbase (one of Circle’s early investors), and was valued on the stock market at $60B when it went public. 

Using the same metrics, Tether would be valued at:

• $60B
• x3 (because Tether is 3 times bigger than Circle/USDC)
• x2 (because Tether doesn’t have to send 50% of its profits to someone else like Circle/USDC does)

= $360B Tether valuation

You could make a bunch of arguments about why it should be higher or lower, but even if you add another $100B or subtract $100B, the point remains the same. Tether is an insanely valuable, money printing machine. This also begs the question of how much Tether’s founders are worth.

How much are Tether’s founders worth?

Forbes estimates Giancarlo Devasini, the largest owner of Tether, is worth $22.4B as of August, 2025… But this is a gross underestimate. Assuming he still owns 47% of Tether, his stake is worth more than 7x that at $169B and he is the 6th richest man in the world. Between Larry Page and Sergey Brin (co-founders of Google) and ahead of Jensen Huang (the co-founder of Nvidia). 

If Tether is this profitable/valuable, why is no one talking about it?

It’s a good question. In my opinion, no one talks about Tether because you and I can’t make money from it. When we buy 1 Tether in exchange for that $1 bill in our pocket, we will only ever get back $1. There is no opportunity for us to ever turn that $1 into $5. It will always be worth exactly $1 (it’s possible it’s worth less than $1 if Tether were to default, but that’s a topic for a different day). 

Because there is no opportunity for you and I to make money from Tether, why would we want to talk about it? It’s not like Bitcoin, Dogecoin or most cryptocurrency tokens where we can invest $1 and possibly turn it into $10. So there’s no real reason for us to pay attention to Tether and get excited about it.

Thus, Tether remains like its co-founders, quietly flying under the radar, making more money than any company ever created in human history.

-Billy Bund