Jack Mallers Steps Down as Twenty One Capital CEO, Merger Collapses

Jack Mallers has stepped down as CEO of Twenty One Capital, and investors didn't take it well.

Shares of the Bitcoin treasury company—a publicly traded firm that holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, letting regular investors gain exposure to the cryptocurrency without buying it directly—dropped nearly 15% on Tuesday.

Mallers co-founded Twenty One alongside Tether—the issuer of USDT, the world's most widely used dollar-pegged stablecoin (a digital token that holds a fixed value of one dollar and functions as the backbone of crypto trading)—and listed the company on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2025 through a SPAC merger. A SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, is a blank check shell firm created specifically to take other companies public faster than a traditional IPO allows.

Twenty One still holds 43,514 BTC. At current prices, that balance sheet is worth more than $4 billion, ranking it second among all public companies for Bitcoin holdings, just behind Michael Saylor's Strategy. Strategy is the company that effectively pioneered the corporate Bitcoin treasury playbook in 2020—borrowing money to buy Bitcoin at scale and daring anyone to tell them it was a bad idea.

The merger that never happened

Mallers' exit comes packaged with worse news. Tether's plan to merge three Bitcoin businesses into a single publicly traded entity has officially collapsed, per Bloomberg. The proposed combination would have united Twenty One's treasury operations, Strike's Bitcoin payments and lending platform (which operates in more than 100 countries), and Elektron Energy's mining infrastructure under one publicly listed company.

Tether first pitched the idea in April 2026 at the Bitcoin Conference, and Mallers endorsed it publicly. As Decrypt reported, the deal was billed as a move to create "the premier listed Bitcoin company in the world," combining mining, payments, and treasury management in one stock. Mallers was set to lead the combined entity; Elektron Energy founder Raphael Zagury was slated to become president.

That structure is done. Strike will remain a standalone company. Twenty One and Elektron are still in early discussions about a potential two-way deal, but no agreement has been confirmed or guaranteed.

Mallers kept it brief on X. "This wasn't an easy decision, but it was the right one," he wrote. "My life's work remains Bitcoin. My Bitcoin company is Strike. The work continues."

Raphael Zagury—founder of Elektron Energy and a former managing director at Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch and a vice president at Goldman Sachs—has been named the new CEO. His message to investors sounds nothing like Mallers'.

Where Mallers built Twenty One’s identity around aggressive Bitcoin accumulation, Zagury is promising institutional discipline. Per Tether's official announcement, Zagury said Twenty One "should be measured by the cash flow it generates and the discipline with which it allocates capital."