Michael Saylor has no plans to sell Bitcoin, even as the holdings of his company MicroStrategy have swelled to reach an unrealized profit just shy of $4 billion.
“I’m going to be buying the top forever. Bitcoin is the exit strategy,” Saylor said, speaking to Bloomberg on Feb. 20 when asked if his firm would sell its 190,000 BTC stash — worth around $9.88 billion at current prices.
Outlining his bullish case for Bitcoin (BTC $51,372), Saylor claimed the cryptocurrency is “technically superior” to gold, the S&P 500 and real estate, despite each asset class having a far greater market capitalization than Bitcoin’s $1 trillion.
“We believe capital is going to keep flowing from those asset classes into Bitcoin,” he said.
“Bitcoin is technically superior to those asset classes. And that being the case, there’s just no reason to sell the winner to buy the losers.”
MicroStrategy — a business intelligence software firm — became the first publicly traded company to start scooping up Bitcoin in 2020. The 190,000 BTC it held as of the fourth quarter of 2023 cost an average of $31,224 each, bringing MicroStrategy’s total investment cost to $5.93 billion.
United States-based spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), excluding the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), hold an estimated 270,000 BTC as of Friday, Feb. 16, according to HODL15Capital data.
Saylor said the demand for Bitcoin, generated by a growing appetite for ETF products, “has been far in excess of the supply from the miners,” sometimes up to “10 times as much.”
However, he brushed off concerns that the ETFs would make it harder for MicroStrategy to buy Bitcoin, saying it employs a “levered operating strategy” for investment in the digital asset.
“The spot ETFs have opened up a gateway for institutional capital to flow into the Bitcoin ecosystem,” Saylor said. “They’re facilitating the digital transformation of capital, and every day, hundreds of millions of dollars of capital is flowing from the traditional analog ecosystem into the digital economy.”
“This is a rising tide. It’s going to lift all boats,” he said.