The Most Profitable Business Per Employee in the World

150 employees generated $14 billion in profit — $93 million per employee — in 2024, leading some to conclude tether is running the most efficient business on earth. how does the stablecoin firm do it?

Originally appeared in Pirate Wires.

Tether made $14 billion last year — more than Pfizer, Tesla, and BlackRock. It did that with no ads, almost no staff, and a product no one even thinks that much about: its stablecoin, USDT. With $147 billion in circulation, it’s the most used stablecoin in the world by a wide margin. And beyond its stablecoin, Tether is pursuing ambitious projects in AI, private messaging, and neurotech.

Every time someone buys USDT, Tether takes that cash and earns yield on it — mostly from US Treasuries. Tether was the seventh largest buyer of US treasuries in 2024, ahead of nations like Canada, Taiwan, and Norway. And its pace of growth is only increasing: total USDT issuance last year was $45 billion (57 percent year-over-year growth), and USDT users grew 13 percent in Q1 2025. Historically, Tether has been notoriously private, but it’s starting to share more about its vision for the future, now that the US regulatory environment has shifted in their favor.

Stablecoins are basically digital dollars that move on blockchains and are pegged 1:1 with USD. They effectively open up access to USD globally as a means of saving, and make money movement — particularly cross-border — much more efficient.

The second largest stablecoin is Circle’s USDC — less than half USDT’s size at $62 billion in circulation — and focused on payment compliance and institutional adoption. While USDT dominates international markets where access to the US dollar is limited, USDC — originally started as a joint venture by Coinbase and Circle — is much more popular in the US.

Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino, a 40-year-old Italian computer scientist and self-described “simple man,” is unfazed by his company’s competitors. “They don’t represent the actual use cases of stablecoins,” he told Forbes earlier this month. He thinks the real use case is giving people in unstable economies access to a reliable currency they can actually use. Individuals in Argentina, Turkey, and Nigeria (among other countries) urgently need dollar access because their own currencies are rapidly inflating, which makes building up their savings nearly impossible.

And while USDT’s primary usage will continue to be in emerging markets, Paolo is also exploring launching a separate, domestic stablecoin in the US catered towards institutions. “How fun would that be for our competitors?” he said in the Forbes interview.

One special aspect of Tether’s business is its partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald, the storied American financial institution that agreed to be Tether’s banking partner years ago. At the time, no other US firm would touch it. Tether was under heavy scrutiny, partly because some of its USDT reserves included Chinese corporate bonds.

Despite the controversy, Cantor took the risk. And recently, Tether allowed the firm to invest $600 million for a five percent stake — a deeply discounted valuation. The move was likely, at least in part, a gesture of gratitude for Cantor’s early loyalty. Notably, Howard Lutnick, Cantor’s former chairman and CEO, now serves as Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration.

“They said that Tether was owned by Chinese people.” Lutnick lamented at a recent Bitcoin conference in response to criticisms around Tether, “It’s owned by Giancarlo. He’s Italian. There’s a difference.”

How to explain the close relationship between Tether and Cantor, the favorable deal? The secret sauce of the partnership lies in the fact that Cantor is a primary dealer: one of just 24 US firms that is able to do business directly with the Federal Reserve. In practical terms, this means that if a flood of users tries to redeem USDT for dollars, Tether can meet the demand right away, because the Federal Reserve relies on Cantor, as a primary dealer, to help keep the government bond market liquid. This status gives Cantor a direct line to the Fed: when Tether needs cash, Cantor can sell US Treasuries straight to the central bank. No delays, no intermediaries. In effect, Tether has immediate access to dollars through the safest, most liquid assets on earth. No other stablecoin issuer has that kind of firepower.

This dynamic puts Tether in a strong position. In 2022, the company was attacked by Sam Bankman-Fried and his firm FTX, who tried to trigger what was analogous to a bank run on Tether by amassing billions of USDT and dumping it, all within the span of two days. Tether ended up handling the resulting $7 billion in redemptions — 10 percent of their supply at the time — flawlessly. A 10 percent bank run in 48 hours would sink most financial institutions, Paolo pointed out in a recent Odd Lots episode.

In a sense, Tether is also resilient to US Treasury interest rate changes: typically, when rates go down, economic activity goes up, which has the effect of increasing Tether’s deposits and the amount of USDT in circulation (upping the amount of money earning yield, even if those yields are lower). When rates go up, Tether earns more on the (potentially fewer) deposits it holds, as higher yields on its reserves directly boost profits. It doesn’t perfectly net out, but it’s a nice structural dynamic for the company.

Critics of Tether love to complain about the fact that the company has never been formally audited, and to speculate that USDT is used for crime and money laundering. In response, Paolo usually points to cases where illicit funds moved undetected through banks, card networks, and payment processors — only to be flagged and frozen once they hit Tether. The company has assisted in over 400 law enforcement operations in the US and works with 230 agencies across 50 countries.

Paolo argues that Tether is actually the last stronghold in areas like South America and Africa before a de-dollarization push. If you go to these regions, “there is not much US presence,” he noted in the Odd Lots episode, “... apart from McDonald’s.”

“There are hospitals, schools, libraries, and airports built by China,” Paolo said, as well as a push from China to launch a gold-backed digital currency to pay all the employees for these infrastructure projects. This move, if successful, would threaten the dollar as a reserve currency and ultimately weaken America’s global political clout.

In African villages, Tether is building out kiosks with solar panels on top where people can rent batteries for three USDT per month. Electricity is scarce in these regions, with 600 million people lacking access to reliable power. Since the average monthly salary in these villages is around $80, the three USDT subscription is well worth it. A similar initiative exists in South America, where local bodegas accept USDT as payment. Each of these channels acts as a grassroots distribution mechanism for USDT (good for Tether’s business) while also spreading dollar dominance (good for the US government).

And Tether’s working on much more ambitious initiatives outside of its stablecoin. The company has invested in AI datacenters like Northern Data, which has 24,000 GPUs.

It’s also developing a peer-to-peer chat app called Keet. Historically, the major challenge with peer-to-peer apps has been their notoriously bad user experience. “[We are] finding solutions to the UX problem so that, eventually, we can have the same UX that WhatsApp has — but completely P2P,” Paolo told me over Zoom. Holepunch — the Tether-created protocol that powers Keet — is actually a broadly applicable peer-to-peer standard that can enable many decentralized systems. “What if, suddenly, we can build applications — from social media, to messaging, to enterprise applications, that reduce the cost of infrastructure by 97 percent, increase privacy, and ensure the ownership of the data to its rightful user?”

More: Tether has developed a platform called Hadron for tokenizing assets, launched self-custodial open-source wallets, and invested in a brain-computer interface company.

Tether is small in terms of headcount — only 150 employees — but big in terms of loyalty: “When we were going through hell, I didn’t lose a single person on my team,” Paolo noted at a recent Cantor crypto conference.

He partly attributes this to the fact that, for a time, Tether mostly hired people living in emerging markets. “They know what matters the most … they want to work with us, because they see that we are actually trying to fix the real problems they have, rather than the problems that the rich world thinks that they have,” Paolo told me.

Tether is a once-in-a-century company because it’s able to “decouple building great technology from making money,” he said. Essentially, the focus can be on innovation (beyond USDT) without immediate profit concerns. Tether can afford to build “the craziest technology out there” — and there’s no pressure to immediately make money off of it — because they’re earning so much from USDT.

“We use [the] technology [we build] as a distribution layer for our golden goose [USDT]. I don’t think any other company can say that,” Paolo told me.

“The more our technology is empowering people, the more we can be successful with our main product. This is opposite to normal technology companies, which need to put people more in a cage if they want to sell more.”

One of the best parts of Tether’s story is that its leadership hasn’t forgotten crypto’s original mission. “Institutions will betray you for one basis point,” he said in the Odd Lots interview. This attitude — though once held by the entirety of the crypto community at the industry’s inception — has been somewhat forgotten. Shifting the power dynamic from extractive institutions back to the hands of individuals was the whole point of crypto in the first place.

It is beautifully ironic that one of the most powerful and richest people in crypto holds so true to these first principles, while others who abandoned them in the pursuit of money ended up less successful — or in jail. It’s also rare that such a profitable business so meaningfully helps its user base: populations in emerging markets that would otherwise have no access to a stable currency. All of this starts with Paolo’s earnest ethos: “I want Tether to be known [as]... a net positive for the world.”

Reflecting on his vision for Tether, Paolo told me, “While the last 20 years were great for the Western world, I don’t necessarily think that the next ten to fifteen years will be stable for the Western world. We are a stablecoin company… but maybe we are just ‘the stable company.’ Our technology is meant to bring stability to society, and we started with money.”

— Bridget Harris