By
Bena Ilyas
April 25th, 2024
According to Saylor, the MicroStrategy wants to buy more crypto as its decision to invest in Bitcoin paid off tremendously.
MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) CEO Michael Saylor believes that his company’s two-year extensive Bitcoin (BTC) investment experiment has been a “tremendous success”. Saylor made his convictions known in a letter to shareholders released on Thursday. As he put it:
“Adopting bitcoin as our primary treasury reserve asset set us apart from conventional competitors and elevated our brand.”
In addition, the billionaire entrepreneur and MicroStrategy co-founder also extolled another worthy BTC milestone achieved by his company. In Saylor’s own words:
“MicroStrategy remains the largest publicly-traded corporate holder of bitcoin. MicroStrategy, together with its subsidiaries, holds 129,218 bitcoins acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.97 billion and an average purchase price per bitcoin of approximately $30,700.”
Furthermore, Saylor also described MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin strategy as “complementary” to “[the company’s] analytics software and services business”. According to him, it also provides more traction for MicroStrategy’s brand visibility and facilitates further growth of the platform’s enterprise customer base.
Saylor punctuated his address by stating that MicroStrategy looks to continue focusing on its cloud-based services and BTC investments.
The total value of MicroStrategy’s BTC stash is still in the green, trading around $10K higher than its original purchase price. However, the profit is still way off the sizable returns it was registering when the prominent crypto was touching record highs of $69K.
How the Saylor and MicroStrategy Bitcoin Investment Began
MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin investment started as an experiment for the business intelligence and cloud computing firm. Back then, the Virginia-based company channeled the surplus cash it realized during the pandemic lockdown period towards BTC. Since then, MicroStrategy has systematically intensified its BTC investment efforts. For instance, the company has resorted to share sales, convertible note offerings, and crypto-collateralized loans to buy more Bitcoin.
As Wall Street’s largest BTC balance-sheet bull, MicroStrategy touched on the intricacies of corporate BTC buying sprees in its shareholder letter. Part of these intricacies sees Saylor continually personally providing liability insurance coverage for the company’s executive teams. In addition, MicroStrategy shed its corporate plan last June because its peculiar Bitcoin buying strategy sent rates soaring.
Furthermore, according to Saylor’s investor letter, contributions to the BTC strategy influence the bonus payouts made to MicroStrategy executives. Additionally, MicroStrategy’s four outside directors continue to receive their boardroom fees in Bitcoin instead of cash. This arrangement is an outlier in corporate America.
Michael Saylor
Last December, Saylor revealed that he personally owned 17,000 BTC worth more than $850 million at the time. A known Bitcoin devotee, Saylor is also one of the longest-serving executives on Wall Street.
Saylor holds absolute control over MicroStrategy, which he took public back in June 1998, wielding 68.1% “total voting power.”
As a businessman and philanthropist, Saylor is the sole trustee of Saylor Academy, a platform that provides free online education.