Is it good for you that a single company now owns more Bitcoin than BlackRock's entire Bitcoin fund? Strategy's filing on October 19th, 2026 put its stack at 848,517 coins. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, the largest Bitcoin ETF in the world, reported about $66 billion of net assets on October 22nd, which works out to a little over 800,000 coins at the price that week. So, the biggest pile of Bitcoin in one place isn't sitting in a fund owned by millions of savers. It's one listed company run on one man's plan.
Bitcoin traded around $82,000 in late October 2026, about 35% below its record of $126,080 from October 6th, 2025. With the market still that far underwater, the habits of the biggest buyer matter more than usual. When it buys, the whole market leans on it. When it changes course, everyone feels it. Michael Saylor, Strategy's executive chairman, sat down with Schwab Network on October 15th, 2026 and was pressed on exactly how much weight his company now carries. Later, we'll hear from an investor who backs crypto companies for a living and who sees the danger in a very different place. In this video, we're breaking down how Strategy's buying compares with everything the miners produce, what Saylor does with the weight he's built up, and where an outside investor draws the line on one owner getting too big. Now, let's begin.
Talk about your strategy. Obviously, you resumed your accumulation of Bitcoin. I mean, the pace of those purchases though, Michael, have slowed down compared to previous years. Why is that?
Well, you know, we've added like 160,000 Bitcoin this year. So, it's actually quite a lot of Bitcoin. We're one of the biggest buyers of Bitcoin in the world. But, you know, there is the law of large numbers that if you're starting from a billion-dollar base, you only need a billion dollars of capital to double.
When you're starting from an 80 billion dollar base, you need 80 billion dollars of capital to double. So, our company is growing rapidly. We think we can grow 20, 30% a year from here, which is very respectable. But, you know, companies like Strive, which is also a digital credit company in the Bitcoin space, they started from a billion dollar base and they were able to grow 100% in a matter of a couple of quarters. So, you know, it's like, do you want the smaller, super fast growing vehicle or do you want the monster company that's going to grind up 20 or 30% from an 80 billion dollar number? And both of those are very legitimate investment ideas.
Put that against the only other steady source of Bitcoin, which is new coins from miners. Since the April 2024 halving, the network pays out 3.125 Bitcoin per block, about 450 a day. Strategy's filings show 673,783 coins on January 4th, 2026 and 848,517 on October 18th. A net gain of about 175,000 in 287 days. In that same stretch, the whole mining industry produced roughly 130,000. One company absorbed more Bitcoin than every miner on the planet created. The Strive comparison deserves a closer look. Strive held 23,156 Bitcoin when The Block reported on it on September 3rd, 2026, after buying 3,156 coins in August alone. That's about 1/37 of Strategy's stack. The same report said Strive shares had beaten the 10 largest public Bitcoin treasury companies by an average of 82% in 2026 up to that point. And a buyer this large has a second kind of power, one that has nothing to do with how many coins it adds each week. Saylor was asked how much influence his company now has over the market.
Yeah. And so the market had a very narrow view of what we're able to do when they thought our options were limited 6 months ago and that's not good for the market. Now the market knows it will do the rational thing, the right thing for Bitcoin, the right thing for the credit, the right thing for the equity whenever we need to and we have billions of dollars of firepower to do it. We are the 800-lb gorilla in the space. Like we're going to sell STRC above 100, we're going to buy it below 100 and we have so much capital, we could buy it all. And so anybody that's trading against us, you know, is probably making a mistake and now the market understands that. That's one of the reasons why liquidity is growing. That's one of the reasons why volatility in the instruments are falling and so that is a rite of passage for the company. It wasn't pleasant, it's a bit painful, but I'm glad we went through it.
So it's kind of like teething problems for the market, conditioning the markets for how you're using that capital because just for an example if people are sort of confused by all this, I mean you've been prioritizing spending money to buy back STRC stock, right? I mean for instance in the first week of October you bought just 334 Bitcoin, 28.7 million, but spent 176.3 million buying back your own preferred stock which is about six times more. So you know, as far as Strategy's cash and where it's going as the strategy I should say, why is that a better use of capital?
Yeah, because the company is a digital credit producer. Our product is the digital credit. So what we're doing is we're converting capital Bitcoin 40 wall 40 ARR into five wall or in this case eight wall credit that pays you a 12% dividend. There's a pool of investors that want to buy that credit. They do not, you know, do you want to hold a volatile asset for a decade with no cash flow? Not if you've got rent. Not if you got a mortgage. So, the pool of credit investors is different. We're creating that credit. And so, if the credit doesn't work, then the company is just a holding company for Bitcoin. So, you know, it's kind of like saying if I had a bank and you could put money in the bank, but you could never withdraw your money, you know, how valuable is that banking stock? You know? So, what we're doing is we're creating a very valuable product digital credit. If the credit works, we can sell billions of dollars of the credit. When we sell a billion dollars of digital credit, all we have to do is see Bitcoin beat the hurdle rate for us. The hurdle rate's about 10 and a half percent. So, we sell a billion dollars of credit, Bitcoin appreciates 10% a year, the company made a billion dollars of net income equivalent.
paying the money back. So, imagine a world where we sell 10 billion dollars of credit a year and Bitcoin appreciates at 10 and a half percent a year. That's like a company that generates 10 billion dollars of net income. Now, imagine that growing 20% or 30% a year. What is that company worth? It might be worth 10 or 20 times that net income number.
The filings show that pattern carried on past the first week of October. In the week to October 11th, 2026, Strategy bought 250 Bitcoin for 21.5 million dollars and spent 192.4 million buying back STRC. The week after it bought 267 Bitcoin for 22.1 million and spent 193.1 million on STRC. In that second week it sold no new preferred shares at all. The 267 coins were paid for with $22 raised by selling common stock while the STRC buybacks came out of cash. Its October 19th filing also showed the budget for buying back its preferred shares raised from $2 billion to $3 billion on top of a separate $1 billion program for its common stock. STRC's trading in June shows why Strategy defends it so hard. On June 18th, 2026, STRC fell as low as $82.50 during the session, far under its $100 target. While about 10.7 million shares changed hands, roughly three times a normal day according to The Block. A preferred share stock that far below par is very hard to sell more of, and selling more of it is how Strategy raises money to buy Bitcoin. The company also has cash to keep doing this. The same October 19th filing showed a US dollar reserve of $4.83 billion, which Strategy draws on to pay its preferred dividends. Size like that looks reassuring when it's propping up the market. The harder question is what happens to everyone else if one owner keeps getting bigger. If you'd like to follow what the biggest players are doing without reading every filing yourself, I cover it each day in the Crypto Nutshell, my free 5-minute daily email. Plain numbers, no spin, straight to your inbox. Click the first link in the description, add your email, and you're in. Dan Tapiero has spent more than 30 years in markets. From 1992 to 2012, he worked as a macro portfolio manager and analyst at firms including Tiger Management, Steinhardt Management, SAC Capital, and Duquesne, Stanley Druckenmiller's firm. He now runs 10T Funds, a growth equity firm that buys stakes in established crypto companies instead of tokens. By his own account, more than half his personal wealth sits in digital assets. So, he isn't looking for a reason to dislike Bitcoin. On the Crypto Insider Show, he was asked about Saylor directly.
Let's talk about Saylor for a second.
I mean, he's done more for Bitcoin than I think since Satoshi. I think he's the biggest proponent that we've had and I think we should be thankful to him. But, he's getting close to owning Well, look, 6% 7% of the real Bitcoin supply when you remove Satoshi's coins and lost coins and stuff like that.
Does it not worry you that there's one entity who is effectively leveraging up his Bitcoin? I mean, the STRC product, whether you like it or not, it's creating leverage on Bitcoin. Leverage at some point can be liquidated. He's nowhere near there. But, does it not worry you that you have this asset 6% of the supply is held by one board of directors? And that board of directors is essentially ongoing leveraging their Bitcoin.
