While crypto bulls continue to wait for Bitcoin to reach the $100,000 milestone, they may also want to consider a company that owns nearly 400,000 tokens.
MicroStrategy has used Bitcoin in good times and bad, after co-founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor tied the software company’s fortunes to the cryptocurrency in 2020.
Lately, his bet has proven extremely lucrative. For the year to date, shares of MicroStrategy are up 513% – even after shares hit a post-election high that briefly sent them up almost 700%.
Either way, that’s well above Bitcoin’s 2024 gain of about 117%. In fact, MicroStrategy’s market cap of $87 billion is more than double the value of its holdings of 386,700 Bitcoins, which at current prices are worth $37.6 billion (and largely purchased at a fraction of the going rate).
In a recent one interview with the Wall Street JournalSaylor explained why there is such a big gap between MicroStrategy stock and Bitcoin.
“MicroStrategy has found a way to outperform Bitcoin,” he said. “The way we essentially outperform Bitcoin is we just boost Bitcoin.”
The company has been an aggressive buyer of Bitcoin and has not been shy about raising new funds through equity or debt to buy even more. Last month, it increases the supply of convertible banknotes to increase its purchasing power.
That’s part of a bold plan to raise $42 billion over three years from stock and bond offerings to continue buying Bitcoins, according to the American newspaper The Guardian. Magazine.
There are certainly skeptics. Last month, Citron Research said it was bullish on Bitcoin, but it was MicroStrategy short circuit even as it complimented Saylor on his “visionary” strategy.
“Much respect to @saylor, but even he needs to know $MSTR is overheated,” Citron wrote X.
But no matter where MicroStrategy stock or Bitcoin goes, Saylor embraces volatility and isn’t afraid to stick his neck out. Even before the Bitcoin boom he once lost $6 billion in one day during the dotcom crisis.
And while recalling how he came up with his Bitcoin strategy in 2020, Saylor told the paper Magazine that “it was a quick death or a slow death, or taking a risk, doing something out of the box.”
This story originally ran Fortune.com