Michael Saylor Bet Billions on Bitcoin and Lost
The longtime MicroStrategy CEO, and perhaps the biggest bitcoin bull, steps down.
3 min
If you ask Michael Saylor why he bet the future of his company on bitcoin, he’ll tell you he didn’t have a choice.
In 2020, MicroStrategy Inc.’s stock was stagnant, and the tech company struggled to compete with software giants. “We were either going to die a fast death, or a slow death, or embark on a risky strategy,” he said.
He opted to buy bitcoin—lots of it. That decision backfired, badly. On Tuesday, MicroStrategy announced Mr. Saylor would step down as CEO, a position he has held since 1989, amid mounting losses tied to bitcoin.
His dalliance with bitcoin began on Aug. 11, 2020 when the company announced a plan to take $500 million—half of its corporate reserve—and convert it into bitcoin. It has since doubled down, and doubled down again.
In total, MicroStrategy raised $3.45 billion in debt and loans. It issued $1.44 billion in equity. The company used it all to buy bitcoin.
For a time, the decision appeared to be working. The price of bitcoin rose from about $17,088 in August 2020 to nearly $99,000 by November 2021. MicroStrategy’s stock rose from US$124 the day before its announcement to a record of US$1,273 on Feb. 9, 2021.
But on Tuesday, MicroStrategy announced its seventh quarterly loss in the eight quarters since it started buying bitcoin. This time the loss was big: $1.44 billion, much of that from bitcoin.
The same day, the company announced Phong Le, the company’s president, will take on the additional role of CEO. Mr. Saylor took on the role of executive chairman.
MicroStrategy shares were down 49% year-to-date through Tuesday, and 78% from its record.
The company is sitting on nearly 130,000 bitcoins valued at roughly $4.3 billion at current market prices. Its market capitalisation is about $4.45 billion. Essentially, MicroStrategy has become a bitcoin-holding vehicle with a cash-generating software business attached to it.
MicroStrategy’s losses reflect the volatility of bitcoin. Under accounting rules, the company must assess the value of its bitcoin holdings each quarter and take an impairment charge if the price has declined. MicroStrategy has taken a string of such charges totalling about $3.5 billion.
The bitcoin strategy turned Mr. Saylor into one of bitcoin’s most visible proponents. His Twitter feed, followed by 2.6 million, is a constant stream of pro-bitcoin quips.
He is uniformly bullish in interviews. In one, he advised people to “take all your money and buy bitcoin. Then take all your time, figure out how to borrow more money to buy more bitcoin. Then take all your time to figure out what you can sell to buy bitcoin.”
He similarly advised a conference room full of crypto enthusiasts in Miami to never sell their bitcoin.
It is this very philosophy that has worried some market observers.
“MicroStrategy is not an ideal investment for most traders,” said Oanda analyst Edward Moya.
For one thing, Mr. Moya said, MicroStrategy’s strategy was only to buy and hold bitcoin. There was no profit-taking. There also was no hedging against the inevitable volatility and tumbles. When the selloffs came, MicroStrategy was exposed to the full breadth of them.
Another problem is that the company doesn’t have many more ways to get more money to buy more bitcoin, said BTIG analyst Mark Palmer. “A lot of the levers MicroStrategy could have pulled to create more capacity have been pulled,” he said. “Now it’s just using the cash flow from the software business.”
Still, Mr. Palmer said, the ultimate judgment on MicroStrategy’s bitcoin bet won’t come until some of that debt it borrowed to buy bitcoin starts to mature. If the price of bitcoin languishes, the company is going to have problems paying back its creditors, he said.
“The ticking clock is the maturity of the MicroStrategy debt,” he said.
Despite the risks and the criticisms, Mr. Saylor still believes in his strategy, and bitcoin. In an interview last week, he noted that the stock is still well above its pre-bitcoin levels, and believes the strategy has raised the company’s profile, despite the risks attached to it.
“I feel better about it today than I did on the day we started,” he said.
He says he will continue to head MicroStrategy’s bitcoin investments. He has no plans to sell any bitcoin, and still expects it to gain in value over the years. The company reiterated Tuesday it has no plans to sell any bitcoin.
Mr. Saylor said swapping the CEO roles had been a long-term plan. “The new executive structure means I can even more enthusiastically focus on communications and strategy and bitcoin advocacy and evangelism,” he said.
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The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021
3 min
As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.
In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.
The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.
Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.
“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.
Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.
Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.
“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”
At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.
An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.
Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.
The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.
The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.
“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.
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