FRMO Corporation Fiscal Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Pivot to Crypto Mining as Winland Nears 50-percent Consolidation

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Thérèse Byars speaking, and I’m the Corporate Secretary of FRMO Corporation. Thank you for joining us on this call. The statements made on this call apply only as of today. The information on this call should not be construed to be a recommendation to purchase or sell any particular security or investment fund. The opinions referenced on this call are not intended to be a forecast of future events or a guarantee of future results. It should not be assumed that any of the security transactions referenced today have been or will prove to be profitable, or that future investment decisions will be profitable or will equal or exceed the past performance of the investments. For additional information, you may visit the FRMO Corporation website at frmocorp.com.

Today’s discussion will be led by Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, and Steven Bregman, President and Chief Financial Officer. They will review key points related to the fiscal 2026 first quarter earnings. Now I’ll turn the discussion over to Mr. Stahl.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Okay, thank you, Thérèse. Thank you for joining us. I thought what I’d do today is make a couple of general points, a variety of general points related to what the quarter was like and talk about it in the context of what we’ve been trying to accomplish for the last couple of years, then we’ll turn it over to questions. The first part of the earnings themselves, the most salient event at least arithmetically, is the decline of our shares of Texas Pacific Land Corporation. It’s a decline in price. We didn’t sell any shares. I’ll just contextualize it. Year-to-date, oil is down on the order of 12%. Natural gas is down on the order of 20%. Its earnings are, to a large degree, dependent upon oil and natural gas. There’s nothing unusual in that. What you might find unusual, that you don’t see too often in companies.

Technically, we reported a loss, even though it’s just a mark-to-market loss. I want to minimize that, but it’s not a cash loss. I say that because our cash actually increased, as you can see from our balance sheet, up to $25 million. We haven’t spent very much of that. I would say in the balance sheet sense, we’re not at a record shareholders’ equity level. In terms of liquidity, most of what we have is liquid. We can produce a lot of liquidity real fast if we had to. We just don’t want to. The reason we don’t want to is because we’re moving in a certain direction to create an operating company out of cryptocurrency. Apart from the robust character of Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, it’s well worth observing that we own now on the order of 44% of Winland Holdings.

If we pass 50%, we’re going to have to consolidate Winland Holdings. If we consolidate Winland Holdings, the financial statement is going to look different than it looks right now. Even if we get to over 50% of Winland Holdings, we’d like to keep building the Winland Holdings cryptocurrency effort. The reason we’d like to do it is it’s an extremely high return on capital. Now, we engage in something called Scrypt mining. Scrypt mining is spelled with a Y instead of an I. In Scrypt mining, what you basically do is you mine two cryptocurrencies with the same electric current you ordinarily use to mine one. In our case, we are mining Dogecoin and Litecoin. Dogecoin, as a coin, doesn’t intrigue us greatly.

Even though it might appreciate over time, the reason is Dogecoin has a monetary policy that calls for issuance without end, which is not the same as infinite issuance. In other words, there’s a constant issuance each and every year. In % terms, that issuance lessens every year because the numerator is the number of coins issued, the denominator is the number of coins outstanding, and the number of coins being issued is constant. The number of coins outstanding keeps increasing. Therefore, the rate of increase will diminish every year. It has some interesting long-term properties. Basically, we mine for cash. We keep the Litecoin. I’ll talk about Litecoin in a second. We basically use the cash to buy Bitcoin. That’s the alternative to mining Bitcoin. Just a couple of points to understand why we do this.

From a mining point of view, which is the same as saying from a return on capital or a use of capital point of view, one of the problems of Bitcoin, not that it’s not a wonderful cryptocurrency, but it has something called a halving. What that means is that every four years, the block reward, the number of coins you get for mining, is cut in half. Ergo, it’s called a halving. If you’re not able to improve your mining operations in terms of their efficiency every four years, you’re going to have a problem. Your return on capital is going to be not very alluring. It’s extremely hard work. You have to be very careful about the equipment you’re buying because the equipment you’re buying could be easily obsoleted. Dogecoin, in contradistinction, does not have a halving.

Therefore, the equipment that we buy to mine Dogecoin, which also mines Litecoin, as a practical matter, has a longer useful life. I gave an example in the annual shareholder letter of when you mine this, what your return on capital really is for a quarter. It’s extremely robust. When you start mining, it’s not quite as robust. Like anything in the world of business, you have to achieve a certain economy of scale. Buying one mining device or two mining devices or three mining devices is not going to do it. Once you get beyond a certain critical scale, you’ve covered your fixed expenses largely. A lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it goes to the bottom line. That’s where we are with Winland. We like to build that and build the economy of scale.

It’s also worth noting that Consensus Mining, a related company, employs the same strategy. Consensus Mining began being traded about six or six to eight weeks ago. We bought some Consensus Mining shares as well. FRMO at the moment owns 11,950, a little less than 12,000 Consensus Mining shares. There are 2.2 million Consensus Mining shares. We are really, really enthusiastic over the mining operations. If and when we cross the 50% barrier and we consolidate, the information you provide is going to be a lot more detailed, and you’re going to see a lot more interesting things in terms of what we’re doing in cryptocurrency. At the moment, they’re separate companies, and Winland Holdings is not a reporting company, even though it really trades. We’ll see what happens if we cross that threshold.

One other point I’d like to make, it’s really in relation to the cash balance, but it’s also in relation to our short sale position. You’ll observe that security sold, not just purchased, our short sale position now on a cost basis exceeds $11 million. You can look at the balance sheet and see the market value. That’s basically, we’re not shorting securities on fundamentals. We are only shorting path-dependent ETFs. Those are ETFs, despite what might happen in a profit-loss sense in any given day, in the fullness of time, those securities are going to decay. It’s an element of wonder to me how that being known by all the market participants is the case. We still have the trading volume we have and the assets under management we have in those ETFs. That’s the way it is.

A not small proportion, as you can see by just doing the relevant arithmetic, a not small proportion of the cash we have in the balance sheet actually came from shorting those securities. Ultimately, those securities become either worthless or next to worthless. The cash is effectively ours to keep without, in many cases, even a relevant tax consequence. It’s a really good policy. We’ve been doing it for years, and we intend to continue it as long as it’s possible to continue that sort of thing. I just call your attention to it because it’s not quite a business, but it’s almost a business. Those are the salient points I wanted to bring up. Maybe now is a good time to open up. If there are any questions, I’ll be delighted to address them. Thérèse, maybe you have some questions, or? Okay.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Yes, we received several questions in advance. This one is, I am trying to understand how MAYAC shares, how many MAYAC shares FRMO currently owns post-IPO. According to this table, as of May 31, 2025, the company directly and indirectly held 1,870,601 shares. Afterward, there was a one-for-two reverse split, which should have reduced the holdings to approximately 935,300 shares. Is this figure correct, or am I missing something? Thank you for your.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: It’s almost correct. Yes, it’s almost correct. I’ll give you the exact figures. This is, of course, as of August 31, 2025, and they are as follows. The restricted shares: 934,884, so pretty close to 935,000. It’s not a bad calculation. We also have some unrestricted shares: 11,396. Those are the numbers as of the most recent relevant date. What’s next, this question?

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: In reference to the top holdings table that we have on the website, since some of these positions are held through funds, do you periodically sell any of the underlying holdings to cover annual management or performance fees? Over time, do the holdings at the fund level tend to decline as a result?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Generally speaking, if the cash is available, we take the fees in cash. Cash is not available because we’re fully invested. We don’t sell. We just take the fees in kind. We’ve done that from time to time. It makes no sense to sell the shares when we want to keep them anyway, realize gains, and have those gains passed out to us and all the other shareholders. Some of the holdings have come to us via in-kind performance fees, which we’re holding right now.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Okay. At FRMO’s annual meeting in September, it was disclosed that FRMO or affiliates of Horizon Kinetics were investing in the Texas Stock Exchange. Does FRMO have exposure to this investment? If so, what is its approximate size?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: We have exposure through the various funds that we’re in. It’s not large in relation to, I’d have to calculate it, see what it is on a look-through basis. It’s not large. It’s not a small number, but it’s not. It’s a small number in relation to the size of our investments. The Texas Stock Exchange didn’t really, when we got around to it, Texas Stock Exchange didn’t really need a lot of capital. Therefore, we didn’t invest a lot of the capital in it. We don’t have a tremendous exposure. We have a small exposure. However, it’s worthwhile noting that when we started with Miami National Holdings, otherwise known as MAYAC, we started with a $200,000 investment. Today, we’re the largest shareholder. What we do over time is we get to know a company and we like what’s going on. We buy gradually over time.

We just don’t take a position over a very short and discreet period of time and hope for the best. The reason for that is as follows. It takes a long time to get to know a company, a very long time. As you’re getting to know a company, a lot of opportunities to buy shares will appear because the stock will go up and the stock will go down for all sorts of reasons, most of which have nothing to do whatsoever with the fundamentals of the company. It’d be great to say we pick a day and we take a very big position in it, but we’ve never done that so far, and it’s always worked for us. That’s the way we scale things. I don’t think one should draw any conclusions about what our ultimate plans are for any company just by what we own right now.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Has the IRS’s new interim guidance on unrealized gains for digital assets changed FRMO’s thinking about the amount of Bitcoin that’s prudent to hold on corporate balance sheets?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: A lot of the Bitcoin that we have is indirect through Winland Holdings and Consensus Mining, so not all of it is on our balance sheet. Of course, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to start selling Bitcoin when it seems like there’s so many wonderful things ahead of it and pay the tax. Direct holdings of Bitcoin are in round numbers 259 coins. It’s not a tremendous amount. Most of our Bitcoin in terms of market value is in the ETF shares like Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, GBTC, or the Bitcoin Mini Investment Trust, BTC. That’s where our holdings are. I don’t know how relevant the IRS guidance is to what we have. Most of it is security holding, not a physical holding, although the physical holding is getting to be in market value terms, not insignificant.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Okay. According to the latest, I’m going to call it disclosure form table of the beneficial owners’ %s, it says that Murray’s holdings in FRMO increased to 18.2%. Were these additional shares purchased in the open market or in a private transaction? I can actually shed some light on that. It’s a difference in how we are. We were formerly only including your directly owned shares, and now we are including those that are indirectly held. While you may have increased your holdings, I don’t think it would necessarily have been enough to move the needle the way this did. Does that make sense?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Let me just say that the degree it increased, it increased primarily because I personally bought in the open market. I may own a few shares indirectly. I don’t remember, but almost all my shares are owned directly. Generally speaking, when the window opens up, I’m usually a buyer. Last time the window opened, obviously, I can’t buy during the quiet period, the period in which we’re preparing the earnings. In an open period or a non-quiet period, if you like, I’m usually a buyer. In the last open period, I was a buyer directly, not by any private transactions or any intermediate vehicle. I just used my own money. I bought the stock.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Thank you. Does the company plan on reducing exposure to investment labeled A in order to reduce risk profile?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: I think you can pretty much guess what investment holding A is. No, we’re not doing things like that. We’re leaving it alone. We don’t engage in that kind of portfolio management. That kind of portfolio management is unbelievably tax inefficient. If there was something wrong with it, of course, we would reduce it. Just to change the weightings, I don’t see any reason to do that. The weighting is going to be whatever it needs to be based on its market value. If we think it’s a good investment over time, we’re going to have it. Since you’re probably referring to Texas Pacific Land Corporation, may I just say this? You know, there’s oil, there’s natural gas. It’s going to last for a very long time. There is water and there is land. The water is forever and the land is forever.

How many businesses can you think of where the most essential holdings are forever assets? I don’t think there are very many. You have to come up with a very compelling reason why you’d want to sell those shares. I at least haven’t found one. If you have one, I’d love to know it.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: This question refers to page 11, note 5, digital assets. From May to August 2025, Bitcoin units went from 159 to 159.1. In the latest release of Winland Holdings’ financial statements on page 22 under Winland Mining LLC, in the year between June 2024 and 2025, Bitcoin went from 76 to 79. Are you satisfied with this rate of accumulation in Bitcoin, and what is the metric for determining if the rate of Bitcoin accumulation is living up to the capital investment in this endeavor?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: At the moment, we’re doing almost all our mining in Winland. We’re still doing some mining in FRMO. That explains why FRMO had the increase it had. We’re doing almost all our mining, not all our mining, almost all our mining in Winland. In Winland, we’re still increasing the scale of operations. As we increase the scale of operations, the rate of Bitcoin accumulation is going to increase as well.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Under Revenue Table in the just released FRMO financial statement, in the consolidated statement on page three, dividend income decreased from $4.4 million in August 2024 to $1.1 million in August 2025. Can you provide any insight into this change?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Sure. Because a year ago, you might recall, Wasabi Trust paid a very substantial, extraordinary dividend. Because extraordinary, it happens once in a while. It happened, and it didn’t happen in the most recent period, which being extraordinary, it’s not going to happen. We just collected the ordinary dividends, and that accounts for the differential. We got a big extraordinary dividend in every period, but we’re not that fortunate.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: FRMO’s stock remains an illiquid trading stock where generally only a few hundred shares trade. Are there any plans that would lead to a more liquid trading stock as well as upgrade the stock’s visibility, at least to the level that just occurred with Horizon Kinetics Holding Corporation?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: We would like to do that. Eventually, we are going to do it. The fact that we have not done it yet, the person you should blame is yours truly. As you can imagine, I have got a lot of things to do. Speaking of the Horizon thing, it took a year to get Horizon to have its current visibility. It was not easy. It took a lot of work. Eventually, we will make the effort. From what I recall, and correct me if I err, I believe the average trading volume of FRMO daily is now 11,900 shares. That is my recollection. It is not as small as some might think. You could look at it two ways. On the one hand, there are things we could do to probably get the volume up. On the other hand, the shareholders like to hang on to the shares.

We cannot be too upset about that. We will do something at some point when I have the bandwidth to do it. Today, I just do not have the bandwidth. I will get to it. I will make an effort.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Zcash has risen sharply over the past quarter, more than 300% in less than a month. How do you interpret moves like that? Does that kind of volatility affect how seriously you can view certain cryptocurrencies as a potential store of value?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: There are about 40 cryptocurrencies, which Zcash is one, that have a monetary policy that are similar to Bitcoin. That’s one of them. I don’t think people realized that was the case. These are new experiences for a lot of people, and cryptocurrency is a new experience for a lot of people. You have to expect that. The average person who invests in these cryptocurrencies thought they were investing in a technology stock, and they find out it actually has a monetary policy, has a value. Only it takes a handful of people to change their point of view. You can have a ridiculously big move in the underlying currency. That’s one. We had some Zcash for a long time. It did less than nothing. It declined. Lately, it’s moved up, and I think it’s very merited.

It’s going to be a while before the lesser cryptocurrencies have the constituencies that are necessary to fully understand what’s going on. I can only hope that it’s attracting educated buyers, and time will tell if that’s true or not. One should not underrate the potential of Zcash, in my humble opinion.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: In your letter to shareholders, you mentioned the gradual accumulation of royalty companies. Could you talk about why that process is gradual? How does that approach compare to your strategies like gradually buying Bitcoin mining equipment or shorting path-dependent ETFs, which I assume are done to manage issues like obsolescence and illiquidity?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Let’s just start with I’ll compare and contrast. Let’s just start with the path-dependent ETFs. The probability is exceedingly high that if you short any path-dependent ETF today, 12 months from now, you will have a very substantial profit. The probability is exceedingly high, but it’s not so high that it’s 100%. If you short a little bit every day, there’s going to be a day or two or three in the course of the 253 trading days of the year where that statement is not going to be true, and 12 months later, you’re actually going to have a loss. In relation to the 253 trades you did, you’re not going to worry about it very much, unbalancing of a profit.

If you did what everyone else did and you decide you’re going to pick the day, and if you’re going to pick the day, there’s a certain probability that you’re going to pick a bad day. Of course, it’s not 100%, and the odds are in your favor. You’re going to pick a good day, but there’s a certain probability you’re going to pick a bad day. All of your coin, all of your shares have been shorted that day. Therefore, despite the properties of the instrumentality, a year from now, if you did that, you’re going to have a loss. If you do a little bit every day, you’re just increasing tremendously the probability you’re going to have a profit. In the case of the cryptocurrency mining equipment, it’s the same thing.

The only risk you really have is technological obsolescence all of a sudden that we just can’t anticipate, that some new company enters the market that we never heard of that has a better product. Of course, it wouldn’t completely obsolete the existing product that we bought, but its value is going to be impaired by a very considerable quantity. I ask rhetorically, isn’t it better to do a little bit periodically? Sooner or later, it will happen to us that some very small, from your point of view, de minimis cryptocurrency mining device purchase is going to be impaired to some degree. Even if it’s impaired to the extent of 50% or 60% or even 70%, the impairment loss is going to be minimal in relation to everything we’re doing.

In the case of cryptocurrency mining, it’s going to be even lessened further because you’re obligated to depreciate the equipment. If it happens a month from purchase or two months from purchase or three months from purchase, it’s still something we don’t want to happen, but we already would have depreciated some of it. Of course, we depreciate over three years. Why take a chance on negating the very high profit potential and very high return on capital characteristics by just picking a day on the basis of what? We have no logical reason to say today is a better day to buy a great quantity of cryptocurrency mining equipment than tomorrow. We have no basis for making such an assertion. Why make such an assertion? Now, royalties, the exact same thing is the case. The royalty payout that you get is a function of the price of the commodity.

It could be gold, it could be oil, it could be natural gas. Over time, the oil price using that increases about 4% a year. With iron ore, that increases about 7% a year. However, there are times when over the course of a year or two, using the iron ore price example, I’ve seen the iron ore price go down 50%. Same idea. The probabilities are decidedly in our favor. Why take a chance and decide for reasons that I have no basis for asserting today is the day I’m going to make a very big investment in a given royalty company and the underlying commodity goes down and I’m going to have a paper loss for some number of years until the inevitable cost increases in production occur and give us a profit? You might say, how do we know that cost increases are inevitable?

Because there’s no shortage of any of these commodities on the planet. It’s just that they become more and more difficult to access. In the case of most commodities, they’re embedded in the earth. You just have to go deeper. If you have to go deeper, it costs more money. That’s why the prices rise. We know what’s going to happen, but we don’t know politically or sociologically what happens in the interim. Why take that chance? There’s no gain that you could possibly have from it. There’s nothing good to come out of it. There’s only something that’s bad to come out of it. The two possibilities are, it’s either going to be bad, in which case you’ll regret the day, or it’s going to function the exact same way it would have functioned if you’d bought a little bit every day. You have no upside.

You only have downsides. Why do it? We don’t do it. Next question, Thérèse?

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Why is the $9.9 million carrying value of Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp on FRMO’s balance sheet extremely different from the one that I calculated? That is the 4.4% interest, right? That should be almost $30 million based on the Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp market cap. Are you forced to discount it by two-thirds by the auditor? What will the new auditor require?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Yes. We’re not forced to do anything. It’s a question of the standard accounting practice. Standard accounting practices because Horizon Kinetics is considered an illiquid security. It’s considered best. We could mark to market. It’s considered best practices to use the equity accounting. We just use the best practices. Obviously, everybody knows what our interest is. Obviously, everybody knows what the price of Horizon Kinetics is. It’s just one click away, making their own calculation. The best practice, given the fact pattern, as we know it to be, is considered to be to use equity accounting. We use equity accounting.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Why isn’t Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp shown on the list of investments?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Why isn’t it shown on the list of investments? I think you’re referring to the list of holdings, our biggest holdings. We could put it in there if people wanted it. It’s not a problem. I thought it was obvious from the balance sheet, but if people would like to see it on the list of investments, I’d be more than delighted to put it on the list of investments. Not a problem whatsoever. Maybe you want to, Thérèse, attend to that for the next meeting.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Be happy to. Why do you believe a consolidation of 50% of Winland Holdings with small revenues and small earnings will give FRMO Corporation a huge price-to-earnings valuation greater than the way it appears to be valued in book value today? What might I be missing that you see clearly?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: I didn’t make any statement about what the valuation of FRMO will be or won’t be. I didn’t say anything about that. I just think it’s better to be an operating company than be a holding company. The reason I say it is because holding companies are, generally speaking, valued historically at net asset value. Operating companies are valued on a multiple of earnings, such as they are. How high the multiple is, is really a function of what the observer analysts think of your prospects for increasing the earnings. That’s all I’m saying. I didn’t say that the market is going to do anything. I didn’t say the market will do nothing. We’re going to find out. You see the direction we’re going, and we’ve been accumulating Winland stock every quarter. If and when we get to over 50%, we will consolidate, and we’ll see what happens.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Virginia has the most data centers in the United States, with over 600 facilities collectively using around 4,900 megawatts of power, or approximately 5 gigawatts. Murray has mentioned that while this sounds like a very large amount of power, it is actually relatively modest compared to the total energy infrastructure or future demand projections. Can you explain this?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: The Oracle project attending to Stargate is 4.5 gigawatts. All of the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia metro area is the most data center-dense area of the United States of America. It took a quarter century to get to 4.9 gigawatts. Now Oracle is going to get to 4.5 gigawatts, almost the same amount, in a very brief period of time. The difference is the new data centers are hyperscale data centers. They’re using semiconductors that draw a lot more power. In about 15 or 16 months, the current NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 chip, which draws 1,200 watts, is going to give way to the Rubin Vera chip that draws 3,600 watts, three times as much. Obviously, once that conversion is made, the hyperscale data centers will draw three times the power. That’s the basis for it.

Anybody who wants to can look up the functional specifications of the GB200 chip and then look up the functional specifications of the Rubin Vera chip, and you can see what the power draw is. It is what it is with one salient difference. If you’re going to do the calculation, you have to allow for something called power usage effectiveness, or PUE. Let’s make it simple. Let’s say I had a one-gigawatt hyperscale data center. What that means is the equipment inside the data center is rated for one gigawatt. To be fully energized, it has to draw one gigawatt of power. That’s pretty simple. Everybody agrees on that. The problem with it is one gigawatt of power is so much power that the mere act of transporting that power, even over a very relatively short distance, is really a long distance. Why is it a long distance?

The chip circuitry is so complex. The distance is not measured from the point where the wire merges from the grid to the transformer at the data center. It’s really a question of the pathway the power takes through all the accumulated circuitry volar racks. It’s really a tremendous distance. When you travel that distance, the electrons are actually, they’re bouncing off the wires. It’s called kinetic motion. That causes heat. What’s happening is you are losing a certain amount of electric power as heat, as kinetic motion. If you have a rate capacity of one gigawatt, your power usage effectiveness coefficient is going to tell you that you need to draw 1.58 gigawatts to fully energize one gigawatt data center.

To put it another way, if you had a 4.5 gigawatt data center and you wanted it fully energized, assuming you did, the actual amount of power is 4.5 times 1.58 or 7.11 gigawatts. That is the problem. Nobody planned for such extensive power usage. If people want to have the services, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and all the other things that go with it, if people want to have that, the only way to do it is to have that power. Speaking for myself, I have no interest in virtual reality, so I won’t be contributing any power to that effort. Everyone else, if they want it, we live in a democratic society. If everybody else wants it, the only way they’re going to get it is they have to have that sort of power. The effort to make that power available is truly extraordinary.

Let me just give you an idea of the kind of effort that you need. The chips, the semiconductors. The semiconductors, a lot of them are going to be doped with a rare earth metal called gallium. You may or may not have heard of it. Lately, rare earths are in the news because the United States has problems acquiring rare earths from China. A lot of people misunderstand that rare earth means that it’s not available. It’s rare in the sense that diamonds are rare. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rare earths are found in virtually every parcel of land on the planet. What rare refers to is the percentage of the material in the earth moved is relatively insignificant. Phrased alternatively, in order to get a relatively small quantity of that substance, you basically have to move a lot of overburden.

For example, if you wanted to acquire one kilogram, which is 2.2 pounds approximately, one kilogram of the gallium, you will need to move 50 tons of rock. I ask you to imagine if you really moved 50 tons of rock. You’re only getting one kilogram of gallium. Can you imagine what you’ve just done to the surface of that land area? That’s your money. You’re only getting a kilogram. If you wanted 100 kilograms, multiply 50 tons by 100. What are you going to do with this overburden once you’ve extracted the gallium? It’s not easy. A lot of these substances are toxic. If it rains while you’re doing it and the substances are released into the groundwater, you’ve got some problems. This is not an easy thing.

Imagine the kind of energy that you’re making use of just to move 50 tons of earth to get one kilogram of gallium. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of effort. That’s only one piece of the effort. You will find that gallium is in every single solar panel in the world. Next time you walk by a building with solar panels on it, just be aware there’s gallium on the silicon substrate. What needed to be done to get that material into the solar panel? Have you ever seen a rare earth extraction facility? I guess this is a subjective statement, but I think you might agree with it. Subjective as it is, let’s just say it’s not very pretty. That’s the problem, and it’s only one of the problems. It’s not energy efficient. It’s not resource efficient, and it creates a lot of environmental damage.

More importantly, it creates a lot of environmental hazard. That’s just something people should bear in mind as they make use of this technology. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not easy to put this into place, and there are costs. There are economic costs, of course, and there are also social costs and environmental costs that I think people should be cognizant of. Just my opinion. I hope that’s a thorough answer to the question, but you can follow up if I haven’t fully addressed it.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Okay. What is the net asset value for Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets and Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets II? The management disclosed the assets within those entities. Previously, it was disclosed that Texas Pacific Land Corporation was by far the biggest position in Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets. PSK, MSB, and PBT were the positions held within Hard Assets II.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: I’m happy to disclose it. Is there more to it, or should I answer? Is there more to this question?

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: No, there’s another part. Another question.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Why don’t I answer this part, and then you can give me the other part? Is that fair? The assets of Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets, one is, in round numbers, about $330 million. Yes, Texas Pacific Land Corporation is the biggest position. Other positions are Wasabi Trust and Prairie Sky. Those are the biggest positions. There are some smaller things in there as well, but those are the bigger positions. In terms of Hard Assets II, first, you should be aware Hard Assets II actually takes client money, and it’s known as the Clemenceau Fund. We renamed it after the French politician Georges Clemenceau. In any event, Texas Pacific Land Corporation is a big position, but it’s nowhere near as large in Hard Assets II as it is in Hard Assets I. Other big positions are the Permian Basin Trust, symbol PBT, and Wasabi Trust is there.

I forgot to mention in Hard Assets I, Urbana, because it’s in Hard Assets II. We have some Landbridge and some Alliance Resource Partners. Of course, in Hard Assets II, we have some Bitcoin ETFs. I think that covers the primary holdings. I should be remiss if I didn’t state that Hard Assets I and Hard Assets II also engage in selling short path-dependent ETFs.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: How much does FRMO contribute? How much does FRMO contribute every month to Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets I and II? It was previously mentioned that it was around $150,000 to $200,000.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: That’s about right. However, FRMO has taken some redemptions from Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets funds. We’ve never taken a redemption in Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets funds. They’re small. We’ve taken some redemptions, and there were some reasons for that. Basically, we were using some of that money to fund the build-up of Winland Holdings. There were also, for reasons that would take a very long time to explain, some shares of Winland Holdings that were in Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets funds that we thought it’s better for Winland Holdings to own directly. We took those as a redemption in kind. There weren’t a lot of shares.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Were those shares transferred to FRMO or to Winland Holdings?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: To FRMO. The Winland Holdings shares, they were transferred.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: That were transferred. Okay. Thank you.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: There weren’t a lot of shares, but they were transferred to FRMO.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: What was the purpose of incorporating Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets as an LLC versus as a fund?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: We weren’t sure. We wanted client money in the beginning. We never took client money in Hard Assets I, and there are no plans to take any money. An LLC gives you a lot of flexibility in things you can do. It struck us as for what we wanted to do. All these things had advantages and disadvantages. It was easier to do the things we want to do in the LLC format, and that’s why we did it that way. Hard Assets II is now taking client money. It’s a different creature.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Did management ever consider transferring their directly held Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to Winland Holdings in exchange for additional shares?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Yes, we definitely considered it. The problem is we pay a very high tax to do that. We realize the capital gain upon doing that, and it sort of defeats the purpose. We want to create value, and we’re transferring a lot of value to the federal government, which I will admit probably needs the money more than we do, but we just like to hang on to it for a little while longer.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: On the subject of electricity generation, can you talk about the water usage, how much water is needed to generate the power?

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: I’ll be glad to do that. Let me first explain before I talk about the number of what you need the power for, so it’ll make more sense. Basically, whether you use nuclear power or you use gas-fired, natural gas-fired generation, or even using coal, I know people think they’re three different technologies, but really, they’re one technology. That technology is called a thermal electric plant. What does thermal mean? It means that you boil water, you boil water, which creates steam, of course, and that steam drives a turbine. Everybody realizes what boiling water is. That’s not hard. The steam turns the turbine blades. That generates electric power. What they don’t know is why do they, how do they turn the turbine blades? How does the steam make its way through the turbine blades?

The answer is the only way that’s going to happen is there has to be on both sides of the turbine a hot area and a cold area. These are relative terms. The hot area is obviously where you’re boiling the water. The other side of turbine blades with the steam that’s coming out, that’s got to be much colder. We need to do that to create a temperature gradient. If you create a temperature gradient, the hot is going to flow into the cold area. You get an even consistent flow of steam through the turbine. By the way, the steam is water. Steam is just water that’s now water vapor. If you take water and you raise the temperature, it becomes water vapor. It becomes a gas, which we call steam. The steam goes through the turbine, and to create a temperature gradient, it’s got to be cooled.

A lot of ways you can cool it, but the most common way is to expose it to the air. When you expose it to the air, you’re going to evaporate a certain amount of water that you have to reinsert to maintain the steam pressure. That’s where the water, that’s why you need the water. Now that you understand how it works in simple terms, according to the American Public Power Association, 11,857 gallons, I’m doing gallons because everybody knows what a gallon looks like, 11,857 gallons of water need to be used per megawatt-hour of power produced. 90% of that can be reused. 10% is going to be evaporated. What’s 10% of 11,857? I’m going to ignore the decimal. 1,185 gallons per megawatt-hour. How many megawatts in a gigawatt? 1,000. If you take 1,185 gallons times 1,000, that gives you 1,185,000 gallons per gigawatt-hour.

There are 24 hours in a day. If it was running continuously, that’s 28,440,000 gallons per day. Let’s translate it into barrels. If we want to translate it into barrels, there are 42 gallons in a barrel. I’m going to take 28,440,000 and divide it by 42. That’s going to equal, I’m going to ignore the hundreds and just make it easy for everybody, it’s roughly 677,000 barrels a day. There are 365 days in a year, so I’ll multiply by 365. That gives me, I’m going to ignore now the hundreds of thousands, that gives me 247 million barrels. At $0.50 a barrel, which is the going rate, it’s going to cost you $123 million and change for that water. That’s not your water bill. I mentioned before power usage effectiveness.

If you’ve got a one-gigawatt power plant, it’s got to draw 1.58 gigawatts to service or fully energize a rated capacity of one gigawatt. I have to take this $123 million and change and multiply it by 1.58, which I didn’t do right. Let me do this again. Bear with me just a second while I do it again. I hit the wrong key, basically. Times 24 times 365 divided by 42. 247 million gallons times 0.5, 247 million barrels times 0.5. $123 million is your water bill, but I have to multiply that by 1.58. Your water bill is now $195 million a year. Are you finished? No, you are not. No power plant can run continuously. It has to go down for scheduled maintenance, and sometimes it’s going to go down for unscheduled maintenance.

To make sure your data center never goes down because it can never go down, you basically have to have another parallel plant running. I have to take that $195 million and multiply it by two. $390 million and change, that’s your water bill. You haven’t used a gallon of water for the data center yet. That’s just to generate the power. That’s a lot of water. Let’s look at the engineering practicalities. You can’t draw the water out at greater than the natural refresh rate of the aquifer, or you destroy your water source.

If you’re in a city, let’s say like New York City, even if you could draw the water out from the aquifer, let’s say in our case, the Croton Marigold Reservoir, at that rate, which in practice you never could, but assuming you could, even if you could, the city’s water system, water mains, are not designed to deliver that water to a data center that’s located in the city or even the suburban areas. We don’t have the water infrastructure to even do it if we wanted to, if we even could. The most important point is a lot of people are going to object. The only thing you can do is you have to go to an area where there’s a lot of water and not very many people. That is very hard to find.

The reason it’s very hard to find is because whatever the culture is, whatever the period of history is, people, as a generalization, want to live near water. You could see why. They need the water for agriculture. They need the water to live. Water is the most important substance of all. Generally speaking, civilization has evolved near water. You’re not going to find very many water sources that don’t have a lot of people around them. If you do find such a water source, would you sell it? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Now you understand what’s going on.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: That was our last question.

Murray Stahl, Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corporation: Okay. I hope you found this interesting. If I didn’t answer the questions, or as happens sometimes, if you realize you should have posed a question but didn’t pose the question and you’d like to pose it afterwards, feel free to contact us and we will get you an answer. We will reprise this in roughly 90 days. I look forward to doing that at that time. In the meantime, thanks for being a great audience and thanks for being great shareholders. I bid you a good afternoon. We shall meet again. Thanks so much.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corporation: Thank you. The conference has now ended. You may disconnect.