Michael Saylor: Why Getting Into Bitcoin in Aug 2010 Was the Right Move for Our Firm

In a recent interview with Daniela Cambone, Editor-at-Large and Anchor at Stansberry Research, Michael Saylor, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Nasdaq-listed business intelligence company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR) addressed his critics.

It is worth remembering that on 11 August 2020, MicroStrategy announced via a press release that it had “purchased 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million” to use as a “primary treasury reserve asset.”

Michael Saylor (the company’s Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO) said at the time:

“Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe is creating long-term risks for our corporate treasury program ― risks that should be addressed proactively.“

Since then MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on June 29, means that the firm is now HODLing around 129,699 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,664 per bitcoin.”

MicroStrategy has purchased an additional 480 bitcoins for ~$10.0 million at an average price of ~$20,817 per #bitcoin. As of 6/28/22 @MicroStrategy holds ~129,699 bitcoins acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,664 per bitcoin. $MSTRhttps://t.co/leQYTXn817

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) June 29, 2022

During an interview with Cambone that was released on YouTube on Friday (August 12), Saylor said:

“Conventional critics and conventional mainstream analysts — they don’t get the crypto economy, they don’t understand Bitcoin, and they hate volatility. And those are the people that would tell you ‘take all your money, put it in a bank account yielding 1% interest, just don’t lose it, and don’t bother us’.

“But when we embrace the Bitcoin strategy we did, we knew that if we held our cash in a bank account, it was going to lose 20% of its purchasing power per year, and it has as predicted. The money supply expanded by 40%: single family homes in the U.s. have increased in price by 40%. If you had 500 million dollars, it would have bought you 40% less today than it would have bought you two years ago.

“So we had to do something for our shareholders at the time. And that something was buy high quality digital property. And our choice was: we could suffer a non-volatile slow death, or we could get on a bumpy lifeboat — a big orange lifeboat, the Bitcoin lifeboat — and we are going to get tossed around in the ocean, but we’re going to float and we’re going to appreciate over time.

“And when I started buying this stuff, Bitcoin was $9,000-$10,000 a coin, and we’ve just been consistently accumulating Bitcoin. We have not sold any Bitcoin. And if you’re a short time horizon person and you want to look at making a trade in the past three months or six months, just about every everything you could have bought in the world in the past six months is a losing trade if you have a short enough time frame, but if you have a two-year time frame, Bitcoin’s winning. It’s winning over four years. It’s winning over six years. It’s winning over eight years. And I just like to be in business more than two years from now. So that’s why we did it.“

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