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Phong Le
President, CEO & Director, MicroStrategy Inc.

Michael Saylor & Phong Le Face Tough Shareholder Questions

📅 Aug 18, 2026 Natalie Brunell 66 MIN 17560 VIEWS 61 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor and CEO Phong Le sit down with Natalie Brunell for a candid Q&A answering unfiltered questions from retail and institutional shareholders. In this episode: What they learned from the $STRC drawdown Michael and Phong address dilution fears around $MSTR common stock Are $MSTR buybacks are on the table, and under what conditions Whether the $1 million and $10 million per Bitcoin scenarios still hold Why Strategy wants to become the “J.P. Morgan of digital assets” and what that really means Follow Michael Saylor on X https://x.com/saylor and Phong Le h...

What Phong Le said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Phong Le, CEO of Strategy, addressed shareholder concerns about equity dilution, dividends, and the company's focus on digital credit. He argued that issuing equity is not dilutive on a Bitcoin per share basis and that the company's priority is building the world's best credit, which will ultimately benefit equity holders. Le confirmed the company will not pay a dividend, as capital is better deployed toward STRC and Bitcoin purchases. He stated MSTR buybacks are possible if the stock trades at a deep discount to NAV, but current focus is on fixing the credit business. Le addressed the JP Morgan analogy, clarifying Strategy aims to be the 'JP Morgan of digital assets' but not model its business after the bank. He discussed the shift in STRC holders from 80% retail to 70/30 retail/institutional, and the importance of US dollar liquidity as a backstop for dividends.

Key takeaways

  1. Strategy will not pay a dividend to MSTR common shareholders; capital is better used for STRC and Bitcoin purchases.
  2. MSTR buybacks are possible if the stock trades at a deep discount to NAV, but fixing the credit business is the current priority.
  3. STRC holder mix shifted from 80% retail to 70/30 retail/institutional, with retail doubling in absolute terms.
  4. The company holds $4.8 billion in US dollars as a backstop for STRC dividends, a key lesson from the recent drawdown.
  5. Strategy aims to be the 'JP Morgan of digital assets' but not model its business after the bank.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$4.8 billion US dollar liquidity on balance sheet as dividend backstop metric 43:02
70/30 Current retail/institutional split of STRC holders metric 45:47
80% Previous retail share of STRC holders metric 45:47
1.07 Current MSTR price to NAV ratio metric 25:00
3-4% Share of MSTR shares in MSCI indices metric 29:27
4% Share of total Bitcoin supply held by Strategy metric 26:30

Chapters

  1. 0:00Equity dilution and dividends
  2. 22:38MSTR buyback considerations
  3. 25:00JP Morgan analogy
  4. 29:27MSCI index exclusion impact
  5. 33:02Cash reserves and S&P inclusion
  6. 43:02STRC drawdown lessons
  7. 45:47STRC holder mix shift
  8. 49:13STRC price stability policy
  9. 58:24Bitcoin custody and AI security
  10. 1:00:03Bitcoin dividends rejected

Questions asked in this interview

12
  1. 20:02And so the equity will actually come later, right?
  2. 22:25Are there any plans to buy back MSTR?
  3. 24:22And how do you reconcile pursuing a JP Morgan-style corporate structure while staying true to Bitcoin's founding philosophy?
  4. 28:32This was suggested in the Q1 earnings presentation, and is it still a viable option?
  5. 29:15What is your stance on MSCI's recent rule change proposal to remove Bitcoin treasury companies from their index, and what do you expect this removal would do to the stock prices?
  6. 31:10Phones can get lost, devices break, backups go missing, right?
  7. 32:47Could Strategy eventually build a 20 to 30 billion USD reserve mainly through STRC to deploy aggressively during future bear markets?
  8. 42:50What lessons has the management team learned from the recent STRC drawdown and recovery that could be applied to increase adoption moving forward?
  9. 45:23Why did retail lead the way on the product and why are institutions now coming around and what is the split now?
  10. 46:58Fong, you have any thoughts on this?
  11. 58:09How is the company thinking about this threat with respect to Bitcoin custody and what are you doing about it?
  12. 1:03:54And these images sometimes reach more people than say a quarterly earnings call or a book for example, right?
Michael Saylor 0:00 ↗
I have more than 19 million shares of the equity, so I feel your pain. But I think we have to be prepared to have difficult years. It might be one year, it might be two years.
Phong Le 0:10 ↗
I think there is this misconceived notion that issuing our equity is dilutive to our shareholders. You know, sellers hitting the ATM, that's dilutive to shareholders, and that's not necessarily correct on a Bitcoin per share basis. If we do the things that are good for the equity in the near term, they're bad for the equity over the long term. And ultimately, we want to create the world's best credit. And if we do that, then the primary beneficiaries will be the equity holders, of which I'm a big one.
Natalie Brunell 0:39 ↗
Michael previously suggested that Bitcoin could reach 1 million per coin if Strategy accumulated 5% of the total Bitcoin supply. Have your price expectations evolved given that the price is lower now than in November 2021? Whoa.
Hello everyone and welcome. I'm Natalie Brunell, author of Bitcoin is for Everyone and host of the Coin Stories podcast. And I'm very happy to be back moderating Strategy's second live investor Q&A. We will get to as many of your questions as we can. They were submitted directly by retail and institutional investors through the company's official question form and on X. We received dozens and dozens of submissions covering a range of topics. And my job today is simply to put those questions to the company's leaders and keep us moving so we can cover as much ground as possible. Now, before I introduce our guests, a brief disclosure. Some statements made during today's presentation regarding future expectations, plans, and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to important factors including fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin and the risks described in Strategy's SEC filings, including its quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed on August 3rd, 2026. This presentation is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities and it is not investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. Any offering of securities will be made only by means of a prospectus and additional information about Strategy is available at strategy.com. So with that, let me introduce Michael Saylor, the founder and executive chairman of Strategy, and Phong Le, Strategy's Chief Executive Officer. Michael and Phong, great to have you back.
Michael Saylor 2:37 ↗
Happy to be here.
Phong Le 2:38 ↗
Thanks for having us, Natalie.
Natalie Brunell 2:40 ↗
All right. Well, we have a lot of questions to get through, so let's jump right in. The first one came from several investors and it's directed to you, Michael. You recently posted a chart on your X page where you outlined a digital asset monetary spectrum that included digital capital, digital credit, digital money, and digital currency. What is STRC, which you describe in that visual, as digital money, and do you disagree that Bitcoin is money?
Michael Saylor 3:14 ↗
I think if you're using the theoretical term for money, then you would say money is a non-sovereign store of value bearer instrument like gold. But that's a classical Austrian economist view of money. The current conventional view of money is that money is a US dollar equivalent or fiat currency equivalent asset like the US dollar that holds its peg against a fiat currency. So I think that 99% of the world thinks that money is a fiat currency, and a money market is a fiat currency that generates yield. I think that there's 1% of the world that are Austrian economists that think that money is gold. Some of them think money is silver, and money is Bitcoin. But I think that's an academic debate, and there's not much point in getting mired in an academic debate because about 0.1% of the capital in the world, or 0.1% of the economic value in the world, is actually invested in the Bitcoin network right now. 99.9% of all the capital, all the money, all the stuff of value is invested in stuff other than the Bitcoin ecosystem right now. A lot of that's equity capital, a lot of it's real estate capital, some of it's metallic capital like gold, some of it is credit, hundreds of trillions of dollars of credit.
So I think that if you want the Bitcoin network to grow by a factor of 10 or 100, then you're going to have to attract capital from the traditional finance establishment. And that means attracting equity capital flows or credit capital flows or money market flows. So for the people that have not yet bought Bitcoin, the ones that we're actually working to serve, their view is that money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and they would think that that's the Japanese yen in Japan or a yen money market in Japan. They would think it's a US dollar money market in the US. They think it's a euro money market or euro in the European Union. And so the Keynesian view of money is money is a fiat currency or a fiat currency equivalent that pays yield. So the chart that I'm illustrating is the digital assets taxonomy. We think that Bitcoin is capital, and so digital capital is Bitcoin, and Bitcoin competes against gold, real estate, equity capital, credit or credit capital, or money markets held as capital or art. Those are all the things that Bitcoin competes against. Again, 99% or 99.9% of the economic value of the capital in the world is not Bitcoin. So if you want to get it, you need to compete against those things. You need to tell people why Bitcoin is better than gold or art or real estate or equity like the S&P index or bond yields.
STRC is digital credit. We've extracted a credit instrument from capital. It's semi-volatile. It's not as volatile as Bitcoin, but it's more volatile than a fiat currency. And the next step is to take STRC and create something that looks like a digital money. And a digital money would be the mythical Bitcoin-backed stablecoin. It's a fiat currency stable asset, whether it's a stable dollar or stable yen or stable euro, but pays yield. So the difference between digital currency and digital money is digital currency is deemed to be stablecoins. It's like Tether or Circle or any other digital stablecoin in whatever currency system is out there. Digital currencies don't pay yield. So, digital currencies are the winners of medium of exchange in the crypto ecosystem and the digital assets ecosystem. I think that there are some fundamentalist Bitcoin OGs that wish that wasn't the case or they've been hoping it wouldn't be the case. But I think that at this point in the year 2026, we can see that substantially all the prices in the world — if I were to say 99.9999999% of the prices in the world are in fiat currency, I might be understating the case. It's just somewhere between six and ten significant digits after the decimal place. All the prices are in fiat currencies, which means that the medium of exchange is generally the US dollar. If you're holding stablecoins, they don't pay a yield though. It makes a good medium of exchange. It makes a very poor store of value or a weak store of value.
The idea behind digital money is to take the best of digital credit and the best of digital currency and merge the two together and create something which is generally stable to a fiat currency but pays a yield. And so if you can actually create a yield on a stable currency instrument, then you've got something which serves as a much better store of value. So that particular asset that I put in my chart — that's the first example, well one of the first examples, maybe the first example of someone creating a digital money asset. And they're creating a digital money asset by engineering a stable asset that actually has yield. The yield comes from digital credit and the asset is stabilized through some financial engineering to be stable to a US dollar. I expect there'll be dozens if not hundreds of different types of monetary assets that people build. So it's not the only one. I think there's about a dozen different organizations that are building digital monetary assets in the digital assets ecosystem. And I don't think digital money will be limited to tokens. I actually think that you'll see digital money funds created as ETFs in the United States and probably as ETPs and other types of publicly traded funds that trade on exchanges all around the world.
And I also think that we'll see private funds, just like there are money market funds that are private that don't trade publicly. There are money market funds that are public that trade as ETFs, and there are monetary instruments like currencies that are stablecoins. So the thing that we think is really important is that if Bitcoin is going to grow by a factor of 10 or a factor of 100, we need to facilitate capital flows from the credit markets and the money markets. And right now what's going on — if you took away STRC and you took away the digital money tokens that are now starting to develop, then what you have is fiat currency flowing into the stablecoin market and it's all backed by currencies, by fiat currency like US dollars, and then you have capital flowing into the capital market that actually supports BTC. But there would be no capital flows in from the credit markets or the money markets into this ecosystem. If we create good credit, then we will be able to create monetary instruments on top of it, and the companies that create digital credit like Strategy and Strive will have equities, and the equities will attract capital flows, which will also flow into Bitcoin. And companies that create digital monetary instruments, the instruments that'll be on top of digital credit, they'll have equity as well, and they will attract capital flows into the ecosystem. So we think that the economy will grow if we actually create credit instruments, money instruments, currency instruments, and equity instruments, all of them that are tied in or backed by either backed by BTC or tied into the Bitcoin ecosystem. So that was an example of the first of what I think will be many digital money instruments. It's not the only one, and certainly I'm not endorsing that particular one as an investment. It's a security-type investment. But I think that it's a seminal event in the same way that when people first created money market funds, that was a pretty important event. And when people created ETFs backed by money market funds, I think that's an important event.
Natalie Brunell 12:57 ↗
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All right, let's turn now to the equity side, to the common stock MSTR. We have a question from Rob. He said, 'I have three children and I invested 73,000 each into MSTR, believing in the long-term potential. Today, that 73,000 is worth 20,000, and the long-term potential is now a function of getting back to break even. MSTR common shareholders seem to be your lowest priority. You defend STRC and pay down converts using MSTR at-the-market offerings. Achieving BTC per share yield doesn't do much for my kids. I have a decade-long perspective, but I'm worried that you will ATM so much that we'll never get back to 325 a share. Have you considered paying out a dividend to MSTR common shareholders simply to do something right by them in the near term?'
Phong Le 15:05 ↗
I can start on that and Mike can add. And Rob, thanks for being a shareholder and investing some money into MSTR for your children. Of course, the common shareholders and MSTR is our most important priority, and creating value and increasing the price of MSTR is our number one priority. How do we do that? We do that by outperforming Bitcoin. And since the beginning of our strategy of putting Bitcoin on our balance sheet, that was August of 2020, Bitcoin has been up 32%. MSTR has been up 41%. So we've outperformed Bitcoin over time. And I understand that you came in later and haven't seen that outperformance. What happens over time, right, when Bitcoin's up, we tend to go up more because we have more Bitcoin per share, and we do that via historical leverage, and we've done that more recently via amplification. What that does mean, and what you've experienced, is when Bitcoin goes down, we tend to go down more. So Bitcoin's seen a drawdown of 50% from all-time highs. MSTR has seen a drawdown roughly of 75% from all-time highs. Because Bitcoin is our underlying asset, increasing Bitcoin per share increases the value of MSTR when Bitcoin goes up, and we'll see sharper drawdowns. So how do we increase Bitcoin per share? We increase Bitcoin per share historically through leverage, through convertible bonds, and more recently through what Mike talked about, which is digital credit and amplification through Stretch. And so ultimately, if we want the common to go up, we have to increase Bitcoin per share. And increasing Bitcoin per share means making Stretch work, which is why it may seem like we're talking primarily about Stretch right now, getting Stretch back to power. But that's what gets Bitcoin per share to go up and MSTR, the common, to go up over time. We're not going to pay a dividend. That's not really the best deployment of capital. The best deployment of capital for us is to get Stretch to work, to buy Bitcoin and put it on our balance sheet. And that's ultimately the objective of the company. And so over time, if you believe in the underlying asset Bitcoin, and Bitcoin starts to rise for all the characteristics Mike had mentioned before, then MSTR will start to rise over time, and that's ultimately the goal of the company.
Natalie Brunell 17:35 ↗
Michael, do you want to weigh in at all on that?
Michael Saylor 17:38 ↗
Yeah, what I'd say is if you want a dividend, you should buy one of the preferred stocks. Like STRK pays almost like a 15% effective yield. So if you're looking for a stable instrument that pays a dividend, then I would look to STRC or STRK. They were designed to pay dividends and give some upside. If your time horizon is less than four months, you probably should own a money market. If you want to make an investment and want the money back or want to see a good return on your investment in four months to four years, you're probably a credit investor and you ought to consider one of the credit instruments. If you're holding the equity, then you need a time horizon minimum of four years, right? Ideally seven to ten years. Bitcoin was at an all-time high about a year ago. So when we're in a bear market, you're going to get more amplified Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin's down 50%, we're going to be down 75%. And in a bull market, we expect to outperform Bitcoin. So when you're buying MSTR, you're getting amplified Bitcoin. When you're buying Bitcoin, you're getting on a roller coaster. So if you are going to get on a roller coaster, then probably you want to use a metric that's like a four-year blended metric. So when we look at Bitcoin, we look at the 200E simple moving average, and that way we take a four-year cycle view and we consider how is it trading versus the four-year average. I think that MSTR is going to be more volatile than that. So I think the whole point of the equity is to generate the amplification. And so if we were to pay the dividend, we would be actually undermining the equity value proposition, and we'd be undermining the credit value proposition. And the reason that the equity is so volatile is because we sell the credit. And the reason that we're working hard to build the balance sheet is because the company's future is based upon the credit.
If we can sell $10 billion a year worth of STRC, and if BTC outperforms our hurdle rate — it's about 10%, 10 and a half percent right now — then the $10 billion of credit that we sold starts to look like net income to the common stock equity holders. So that being the case, you'll get a multiple on the credit sales. If there are no credit sales, then there isn't anything to multiply. And so the single most important thing is for us to stabilize the credit business and to build the most sustainable, highest-quality credit business that we can. And so the equity will actually come later, right? We're in investment mode to build the credit. If we do the things that are good for the equity in the near term, they're bad for the equity over the long term. And on the other hand, if we do the things that are good for the credit in the near term, that will be good for the equity. So ultimately, the product of the company is the credit, and the better the credit is, the more valuable the company is. And we think the company will be very, very valuable if we make the credit, especially STRC, successful. So we're making a long-term investment. It's not unlike Netflix or Amazon when Amazon was building out Amazon Prime. They were providing cheap shipping and or free shipping for a long period of time, and people thought it was not great for the equity. But at the point where everybody in the country is subscribed to the product and they all use the product and Amazon won the market, and our view is the same. We want to win the digital credit market. We ultimately want to create the world's best credit, and if we do that, then the primary beneficiaries will be the equity holders, of which I'm a big one. I have more than 19 million shares of the equity, so I feel your pain. But I think we have to be prepared to have difficult years. It might be one year, it might be two years. We wouldn't think it would be four years, but we might have to actually ride through some number of months or a year or two in order to get to the point where things start to work to the benefit of the equity.
Natalie Brunell 22:25 ↗
Multiple investors pointed out that you recently sold Bitcoin and you recently purchased back STRC. Are there any plans to buy back MSTR?
Phong Le 22:38 ↗
I think we're open to buying back MSTR if it trades at a discount to NAV, or if it's the right thing for the company to do. We evaluate all these programs week by week, day by day. Right now STRC is trading at a discount to par, so it's a pretty obvious thing for us to do. And MSTR is not trading at a discount to NAV, so we're prepared to do it at some point if we needed to. If MSTR is trading at a very, very deep discount to NAV, then probably you would see us do something like that. But right now it's not the highest priority of the company. The best thing we could do right now is fix the credit. If we fix the credit, the equity premium should expand, and that will be good for the equity. If we take the capital that we could use to fix the credit and start buying back the equity, that would be credit negative. And if it's credit negative and the credit business weakens, then even if you were trying to buy the equity in the open market, it would be weakening, because the fundamental question is: is the credit business worth a hundred billion or a trillion dollars? If there is no credit business, the answer is no, it's worth zero. But if there is a credit business, then there's just a debate over whether or not it's worth 50 billion or 100 billion or 250 billion or a trillion. And so the single most important thing for us to do is make the credit work, and right now we're allocating our capital to doing that.
Natalie Brunell 24:22 ↗
Okay. So fix the credit, fix the equity. Phong, this question is for you from Johannes Schmidt. CEO Phong Le has cited JP Morgan as a model for how Strategy should evolve for digital credit. Yet, Bitcoin's entire philosophy was designed as a direct alternative to the centralized trust-based banking system that JP Morgan represents. Doesn't modeling Strategy's business, including STRC, after a centralized institution like JP Morgan contradict the decentralized principles that Bitcoin was built on? And how do you reconcile pursuing a JP Morgan-style corporate structure while staying true to Bitcoin's founding philosophy?
Phong Le 25:00 ↗
Yeah, let me address that. But I do want to follow up on the previous question because I think there is this misconceived notion that issuing our equity is dilutive to our shareholders. If we sell digital credit, STRC, and we issue equity to pay the dividend, it's highly accretive to our shareholders. If we issue equity that's greater than 1x MNAV — and we're currently about 1.07 — to buy Bitcoin, that's actually accretive to our shareholders because it increases Bitcoin per share. If we issue equity to buy back STRC at a discount at which we issued it — so if we issue STRC at $100, we issue equity above 1x MNAV, and we buy STRC back at $95, that's also accretive to our shareholders. And it's accretive to Bitcoin per share. That's what matters. So I just want to make sure that that's understood, because a lot of times people say, 'You know, sellers hitting the ATM, that's dilutive to shareholders,' and that's not necessarily correct on a Bitcoin per share basis.
Michael Saylor 26:14 ↗
And the last trade is that we saw the equity at a premium to NAV to buy US dollars, that's also accretive to the shareholders.
Phong Le 26:20 ↗
Yeah.
Michael Saylor 26:21 ↗
So all the trades we're doing are accretive. They're strengthening the balance sheet of the company. They're strengthening the company. They're improving our long-term prospects.
Phong Le 26:30 ↗
Yeah. We don't want to be JP Morgan. We want to be the JP Morgan of digital assets, right? And which is a big difference. There are a lot of things to admire about JP Morgan. They're the most valuable bank in the world. We would like to be the most valuable digital asset company in the world. They have a great amount of trust, a great amount of equity value. We'd love to have the amount of trust and equity value in the digital asset world that JP Morgan has in the traditional banking world. They are one of the largest players in the repo market, right? They're a bank that the federal government turns to at times for assistance if it's needed. We want to have that level of trust and scale in the digital asset world. But we're not modeling our business after JP Morgan. The analogy is we want to be the largest and most important player in the digital asset world. That starts with holding the most Bitcoin in the world, which we have now at 4%. That continues with building products on top of Bitcoin like digital equity, which is MSTR, digital credit, which is STRC. And it continues with then having other players in the digital asset world build products on top of ours like digital money, which Mike mentioned earlier. So we believe that being the largest holder of Bitcoin allows us to have the stature that JP Morgan has, but we're not modeling our business after that. So that was really the point there. It's much like when Mike says that STRC is our iPhone moment. Obviously, we're not trying to build a business modeled after the iPhone or Apple, but the iPhone is the most successful product in the history of the world, and we think STRC can be the most successful digital credit product in the world.
Natalie Brunell 28:32 ↗
This next question comes from @Grain of Salt. Would Strategy sell STRC and use the proceeds for a cash reserve and MSTR buybacks in addition to buying Bitcoin? This was suggested in the Q1 earnings presentation, and is it still a viable option?
Phong Le 28:48 ↗
Sure. Yeah, we could use the capital — we could swap STRC for MSTR. We can swap STRC for USD. We can swap STRC for BTC. We could swap STRC for any other debt instrument or credit instrument outstanding. So there are probably other things we could do with it as well, but we're very open-minded about how we use the capital.
Natalie Brunell 29:15 ↗
Next question is from Garrett. What is your stance on MSCI's recent rule change proposal to remove Bitcoin treasury companies from their index, and what do you expect this removal would do to the stock prices?
Phong Le 29:27 ↗
I can start with the latter, right? MSCI indices represent somewhere between 3 and 4% of our current shares. If we were to be excluded from their indices, then you could expect that to create some selling pressure over a period of time, but it's really immaterial to us, right? Like 3 to 4% isn't something that is going to cause a major change in our share price over a period of time. So I would call it immaterial, and to Bitcoin it's even less important — one-tenth of a percent perhaps if you include what we hold in terms of Bitcoin. More importantly, I don't think MSCI is aligned with the US government, the world markets, or other indices. I think the fact that they're taking a second cut at this is a bit ill-advised. They've taken a different approach to it, which is to redefine what an operating asset is. The SEC and FASB have defined what an operating asset is for Strategy, and Bitcoin certainly is that. They don't see Bitcoin as an operating asset. So I think they're sort of taking a position against generally accepted accounting principles and the SEC. And so we'll go back and we'll respond to them, and try to understand better why they're taking this approach that's antagonistic to Bitcoin and the asset class. And I think they will consider our responses and others and be constructive about this and hopefully not move forward with their latest proposal. But even if they do, I don't think it's that important to us in the end.
Natalie Brunell 31:10 ↗
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All right, this question comes from Sergio. Could Strategy eventually build a 20 to 30 billion USD reserve mainly through STRC to deploy aggressively during future bear markets? And could a larger cash buffer also strengthen the...
Phong Le 33:02 ↗
Case for S&P 500 inclusion? I think we'll always carry large cash balances going forward, and over time we expect the US dollar reserve balances to grow. We expect BTC reserves to grow. We expect the operating cash or US cash balance that's unrestricted to grow, and we will use that opportunistically to buy back our credit, buy back our stock or buy back our debt, or buy Bitcoin whenever we think it makes sense. So the company's optionality is growing, and at this point we would expect we'll just keep getting larger from here, and we will have more trading options than we've had in the past.
Michael Saylor 33:53 ↗
And on the question around S&P inclusion, I mean there's two different things here. One is S&P the ratings, the second is S&P the index. On the ratings, right, we currently have a B minus corporate rating. I think increasing the cash reserve will help with that, right? And could over time improve our rating. Ultimately, what'll improve the rating is whether they deem Bitcoin as capital that we have in our balance sheet. Right now, they see it as not true capital. It's rated, you know, zero value. If that changes, then our rating will go up. And that's probably the most important thing, more important than having US dollars. Index inclusion I don't think is directly correlated to the US dollars on our balance sheet. Jerry asks is the focus permanently on Bitcoin per share accretion via financing or could opportunistic spot purchases play a larger role in supporting liquidity and price discovery going forward. Our primary focus is to create digital credit that strips a large portion of the volatility off of Bitcoin and extracts a yield. And so that's STRC. We're not really traders. We think that that market, which is the digital credit market right now, is about $15 billion. We think it can become a hundred billion dollars, then 200 billion, then 400 billion, then a trillion. So the business of the company is to create the credit. The trade that we're making is we're willing to bet that Bitcoin will outperform our hurdle rate. Right now, our hurdle rate is 10.5% or something. We update on our website every 15 seconds. The duration of the company is like 33 years. And so the business of the company is we're sort of betting sometime over the next 10 to 30 years that we're right. And we're not really traders, you know, from day to day. So the reason you should buy the equity is not because we trade Bitcoin. If you really think that you found someone that can trade Bitcoin really well, you should invest in their private fund. The reason you should buy the equity is because the company has $60 billion of capital and can create five or 10 or 20 billion a year of credit. And if Bitcoin beats the hurdle rate, that means the company makes 20 billion a year. And if you want to own a company that makes 20 billion a year that can grow 30% a year, then we're that company, right? So if you believe in digital credit then you would look at it and say okay well the company that can do that is very valuable. I think that as a practical matter we will hold more cash and if Bitcoin is trading at an extreme premium to the 200-day moving average we'll probably tend to acquire cash rather than BTC when we sell credit and if Bitcoin is trading at a low premium or a discount to the 200-day moving average we'd probably lean toward a bit more BTC than cash. So I think that where Bitcoin is in the cycle may drive our cash to BTC allocations, but ultimately we're not traders. And I think what people often times they miss is they don't realize that in a bull market our equity premiums expand. So demand for the equity expands, the equity premium expands, demand for the credit expands, the credit risk on the credit falls. And so both the equity and the credit businesses explode and capital flows to the company. So in a bull market when the Bitcoin price is rising or is high, we will tend to have a lot more capital come in the door and therefore we'll buy a lot more Bitcoin because that's when the capital comes. And in a bear market when Bitcoin is crashing, the equity premiums compress and the credit weakens and there's less demand for the credit and there's less demand for the equity. And so we will tend to buy less Bitcoin in a weak Bitcoin market than in a strong market. But at the end of the day, if we're selling the equity at a premium to the underlying Bitcoin, right, if Bitcoin rallies and we're selling the equity at a massive premium, the fact that we paid double when we sold the equity for triple, you know, isn't a problem. It was still a credit to the company. So the price of Bitcoin when we're swapping equity for Bitcoin doesn't matter. And the price of Bitcoin when we swap credit for Bitcoin only matters over the duration of the credit. So over a decade if we're wrong then we'll be wrong in 10 years on the credit. But with the equity we can never be wrong. Like if Bitcoin rallies and our equity premium expands, we could pay a million dollars a coin for Bitcoin and we'd pay for it with a massive, you know, stock price of 25,000 a share. We'd swap it. Bitcoin might crash from a million to 200,000 and people would say, "You're crazy. You bought it 5x more than is." But the point is, we swapped equity for the Bitcoin at the top of the market. And so at the bottom of the market, the question is not well did Bitcoin draw down. The question is over the next 10 years, will Bitcoin outperform our hurdle rate or the cost of the credit? And at the end of the 10 years, we'll know. So we're long-term thinkers. We're not short-term traders. And the amount of acquisition of dollars or Bitcoin or the amount of capital markets activity we engage in is really dictated by the capital markets. That's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is capital. The credit markets, that's the demand for STRC, and then the equity markets, the demand for MSTR, and even to a certain degree, the derivatives market. So those capital markets, they're all moving independently and sometimes they're correlated and we are participating in all of them every day, you know, and so that's the key thing to keep in mind when you consider what will we do and why do we do what we do.

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APA

Le, P. (2026, August 18). Michael Saylor & Phong Le Face Tough Shareholder Questions [Interview transcript]. Natalie Brunell. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1226515/

MLA

Phong Le. "Michael Saylor & Phong Le Face Tough Shareholder Questions." Natalie Brunell, 18 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1226515/.

BibTeX
@misc{le2026_1226515,
  author       = {Phong Le},
  title        = {Michael Saylor \& Phong Le Face Tough Shareholder Questions},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, Natalie Brunell. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {aug},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1226515/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}