Jack Mallers Steps Down as Twenty One Capital CEO, Raphael Zagury Takes Over

Jack Mallers has stepped down as CEO of Twenty One Capital, the Bitcoin treasury company he founded and grew into one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin in the world. The move landed the same morning Bitcoin pushed back toward $67,000, and it arrives alongside the collapse of the three way merger that was set to combine Twenty One, Strike, and Elektron Energy into a single Bitcoin native company.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Mallers posted the news himself on X. "I've decided to step down as CEO of Twenty One," Mallers wrote on the social media platform X, adding "My life's work remains bitcoin. My bitcoin company is Strike." The tone of the announcement was amicable rather than combative, and Mallers framed the move as a return to full time focus on Strike, the Bitcoin payments company he founded and still leads.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and a Twenty One Capital board member, said: "On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to thank Jack for his vision and leadership in founding Twenty One Capital, and for guiding the Company through its business combination and successful listing on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2025." Mallers responded in kind: "I'm grateful to everyone at XXI and everyone who believed in what we built. Serving Bitcoiners has always been the mission, and that doesn't change. Strike is where I carry it forward."

WHO IS TAKING OVER

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. He had already been on Twenty One's board. His appointment took effect July 20, and he previously served as an independent director and interim Audit Committee chair for Twenty One, resigning from his committee roles to take the chief executive position while remaining on the board.

Zagury's own framing of the job is a departure from the pure accumulation strategy Mallers built. Where Mallers built Twenty One's identity around aggressive Bitcoin accumulation, Zagury is promising institutional discipline, saying Twenty One "should be measured by the cash flow it generates and the discipline with which it allocates capital."

THE MERGER THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN

The leadership change did not happen in isolation. The proposed three way merger between Twenty One Capital, Strike, and Elektron Energy has been abandoned, with Strike no longer participating, and Twenty One Capital is now weighing a potential two way combination with Elektron Energy as it revises its corporate strategy. Strike intends to remain a standalone company, with no plans for it to unite with Twenty One Capital anymore, though discussions between Twenty One and Elektron are ongoing.

The market reaction was swift. Shares of Twenty One Capital fell nearly 18% on July 21 to around $4.37 as investors digested both the leadership change and the collapse of the broader expansion strategy. The stock has traded well below its 2025 peak of around $47 and remains highly tied to bitcoin's price and to investor sentiment toward treasury companies that hold bitcoin without generating much operating cash flow, down 53% from the peak.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR BITCOIN TREASURIES

Twenty One still sits near the top of the Bitcoin treasury league table. The firm, the product of a joint effort by Tether, Bitfinex, Cantor Fitzgerald, and SoftBank, is the second biggest public Bitcoin treasury, according to Bitcointreasuries.net, with a total of 43,514 coins. That scale is exactly why the strategic pivot matters. The shift reflects a broader trend among Bitcoin treasury firms, which are increasingly being judged on governance, capital allocation and sustainable cash flow rather than the size of their Bitcoin holdings alone.

Mallers himself pointed to that same disagreement as the root of his exit. Mallers confirmed on July 21 that he chose to step down because he and Twenty One's board no longer shared the same vision for building the company, resigning after a strategic disagreement with the board over its long term direction.

Michael Saylor's Strategy remains the dominant player in the pure accumulation model. What Twenty One is now signaling, under new leadership drawn from one of the largest private Bitcoin mining operations in the world, is a different bet: that a Bitcoin treasury needs an operating business generating cash flow underneath it, not just a balance sheet stacked with coins. Whether that model outperforms the simple accumulation playbook Mallers helped pioneer is the question the next earnings report, expected in early August, should start to answer.