Today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks with Strategy CEO Michael Saylor about the transition to Digital Capital.
Big story: The United States is on the side of the United Nations’ Russia and China, but Ukraine’s mineral trade is visible.
Market: Down, Down, Down.
Analyst notes from Saxo (Nvidia revenue), Wedbush (Tesla), Apollo (S&P) and Convera (Trump tariffs).
Plus: All news and water cooler chat from Fortune.
good morning. From 1989 to 2022, Michael Saylor was co-founder and CEO of MicroStrategy and recently rebranded Strategy As As Strategy As As Strategy, a software company that had been stomping the shadow of its bigger rivals. Saylor then pivoted the company and became a Bitcoin buyer. This is a lot of Bitcoin. As of yesterday, it has held 499,096 bitcoins. This is worth around $46.6 billion. This is a number that can change considerably by today or tomorrow, depending on supply and demand. That’s true of any asset class, but the difference between Bitcoin is that it has no law or intrinsic value and no support from central banks or financial institutions. It is speculative to fan favorites among many investors and ransomware gangs, while others have a huge desire for risk.
nevertheless. With so much demand and so many investment products built around Bitcoin, there is clearly a future for currency. What prices are open to discussion? Currently, Strategy Executive Chairman, Saylor believes the price will reach $13 million by 2045, up from around $94,000 per coin today. It sounds wildly speculative. But Saylor is the man who stakes his entire company on Bitcoin. This is a strategy that has driven previous irregular stock prices, which had risen more than 2,000% since 2020.
“Bitcoin is above everything,” he told me last week when moderated a fireplace chat with him at the FII in Miami. Originally buying Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, he now calls it the most popular, useful, global, digital, interesting and fastest growing asset. His investors clearly agree (though the Strategy stock price has been reduced since late November).
According to Saylor, “We are a Bitcoin finance company.” Once upon a time, MicroStrategy was a data analytics company. It’s not officially yet. But now the strategy is primarily selling stocks and debts and spending that money on buying more Bitcoin. Saylor owns approximately 10% of the company’s stake and owns over $2 billion in Bitcoin. As my colleague Sean Tully pointed out, there are many skeptics who believe this doesn’t end well. However, Saylor plans to continue making big bets on Bitcoin as much as possible. “You can only use technology to create the perfect money once in five,000 years,” he says.
The story continues