Tether’s Bitcoin treasury company CEO departs, taking away $1.6 million in cash

Come on, let me tell you something.

Recently there was a guy named Jack Mallers. He was previously the CEO of Twenty One, a publicly listed company that held Tether and focused specifically on managing Bitcoin reserves. He resigned just recently—then immediately issued a statement saying he “voluntarily stepped down.” He didn’t take any severance pay and also gave up his options. Sounds extremely noble, right?

But guess what? The numbers in the regulatory filings directly call him out—when he left, he received about $1.6 million in cash as a one-time payment. Add in his salary, bonuses, consulting fees, and legal fees from the prior 22 months, and the total comes to over $2.2 million. The full text of the agreement doesn’t even mention “severance pay,” so he can insist—straight-faced—that he didn’t receive compensation. But $1.6 million in cold, hard cash—did it really fall from the sky?

Then there’s that pile of “given up” options. The company canceled the unvested portion, but he kept 1,522,407 vested options with an exercise price of $14.43. But the current Twenty One share price is below $5—so those options are already worthless. What he calls “giving up” was really letting the company destroy a bunch of junk paper itself.

You think that’s the end? None of the promises he made to the company back then were ever cashed in.

In 2025, when it went public via a reverse merger, he talked up in front of the cameras: Twenty One would build stable cash flow, benchmarking Coinbase’s revenue, user scale, and profits. What happened, though? From start to finish, the company produced zero meaningful operating income, and it eventually became exactly the kind of “passive Bitcoin reserve holding company” that he looked down on the most. He demanded shareholders evaluate him using “Bitcoin holdings per share.” Later, that metric was quietly not disclosed—because it basically didn’t grow.

He also planned to merge three entities—Twenty One, his own payments company Strike, and mining firm Elektron—to create a cash-flow machine. Merger talks officially broke down on July 21, and Strike stayed independent. He failed to sell and cash out his stake in Strike to the company; the M&A fell into bankruptcy instead. The board handed management control to Raphael Zagury, from the Tether faction. The company’s new strategy is called “focus on cash-flow creation”—translated into plain human language: during your time, Mallers, cash flow is zero.

Ironically, on the day Mallers joined the company, Twenty One’s stock price was $17.83. Now it’s down two-thirds from that level—plummeting 91% from the peak. Retail shareholders’ assets are down 84%, yet he personally walks away with $2.2 million.

He said his resignation had “no disagreement of any kind” with the company. And that’s true—there was no disagreement. The company had no issue, and he had no issue either. Only retail shareholders had issues. But who listens?

Data doesn’t lie. This is the real story behind the so-called “voluntary resignation.” Next time someone tells you, “I didn’t take any money,” you’d better first check whether the contract says “stock buyback” somewhere in it.

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