Good morning. From 1989 to 2022, Michael Saylor was cofounder and CEO of MicroStrategy, recently rebranded as Strategy, a software company that was plodding along in the shadows of bigger rivals. Then Saylor pivoted the company to become a buyer of bitcoin—a lot of bitcoin. As of yesterday, it holds 499,096 bitcoins. That’s worth about $46.6 billion, a number that could shift quite a bit by today or tomorrow, depending on supply and demand. While that can be said of any asset class, what’s different about Bitcoin is that it has no legislated or intrinsic value, no backing by a central bank or financial institution. That makes it speculative for many investors and a fan favorite among ransomware gangs—and others with a huge appetite for risk.
And yet. With so much demand and so many investment products built around Bitcoin, the currency clearly has a future. At what price is open to debate. Saylor, now executive chairman of Strategy, believes the price will hit $13 million by 2045, up from roughly $94,000 per coin today. It sounds wildly speculative. But Saylor is a man who has bet his entire company on Bitcoin, a strategy that has thus far pushed its formerly lackluster stock price up more than 2,000% since 2020.
“Bitcoin outperforms everything,” he told me when I moderated a fireside chat with him last week at FII in Miami. Having originally bought Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, he now calls it the most popular, useful, global, digital, interesting, and fastest-growing asset there is. His investors clearly agree (although Strategy’s stock price has trended down since late November).
According to Saylor, “we’re a Bitcoin treasury company.” Once upon a time MicroStrategy was a data analytics company. It still is, officially. But, now, Strategy mostly sells shares and debt and then takes that money to buy more Bitcoin. Saylor owns about a 10% stake in the company, and more than $2 billion in Bitcoin. There are plenty of skeptics who believe this will not end well, as my colleague Shawn Tully has pointed out. But Saylor plans to continue betting big on Bitcoin as long as he can. “It’s only once in 5,000 years that you create perfect money using technology,” he says, arguing the migration to digital capital has just begun.
Among Bitcoin fans, Saylor is a rock star. There was a constant stream of people asking for selfies and pitching him on their companies when we were together in Miami. But he isn’t this century’s version of Gordon Gekko, hawking a mindless new version of “greed is good.” The childless billionaire plans to leave all of his profits to a foundation that he has devoted to making education free for all. When I ask what brings him joy, he looks at me quizzically and then mentions that he likes his homes and a koi pond he has built. But his passion is creating more wealth through Bitcoin.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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