Michael Saylor told Time Magazine why his company, MicroStrategy, invested so heavily in bitcoin.
Saylor revealed that due to the pandemic last year, corporate expenses dropped dramatically, causing an ongoing build-up of cash reserves.
Feeling deeply uneasy about the inflationary prospects of the US dollar, seeing that he estimates a devaluation of the greenback of about 15% per year, he began to consider cash as “trash” because it is much like a “melting ice cube”.
At this point, he started looking for alternatives, and by studying Bitcoin he came to consider it a sort of digital version of gold, acting as a store of value. So in August 2020, he decided to convert a significant portion of his company’s liquid reserves into bitcoin, buying 21,454 BTC with $250 million.
The average purchase price was less than $12,000, while the current price is close to $60,000. In other words, in seven months that investment has almost quintupled in value.
MicroStrategy has since continued to buy BTC, and now holds 90,531 BTC, with a current dollar value of about $5 billion. The market value of MicroStrategy’s shares has also soared from $123 at the end of July 2020 to $777 today, even touching $1,272 on February 9th, 2021.
Michael Saylor: bitcoin a hedge against inflation
During the interview, Saylor also explicitly disclosed that his famous tweet exchange with Elon Musk had an impact on Tesla’s decision to invest 8% of its cash in bitcoin
The CEO of MicroStrategy also said that investing in BTC is “a rational action in response to monetary inflation” as the supply of fiat currency is expanding in an unprecedented way.
He said:
“Bitcoin is a unique new technology, it’s like the Facebook of money or the Google of money. And it grew from nothing to a trillion dollars in monetary value in 12 years”.
On his own Twitter profile, when sharing this interview, he then added:
“Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come”.
#Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come. https://t.co/Rn1zxBV0iD
— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) March 21, 2021
