"We're The Biggest Buyer of Bitcoin in the World": Michael Saylor's Infinite Vision

You know, we bought $62 billion of Bitcoin. We're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. We will probably be, continue to be, ad infinitum, the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world.

I think it's awesome. I mean, it's been, 2026 is, I think, a great year. It's really exciting. Our digital credit product Stretch has exploded in popularity, and I just finished speaking and meeting with a bunch of people at Consensus down here in Miami.

And it was my first time at Consensus, and I think you could summarize what's going on here is the convergence of TradFi and DeFi through digital credit and the convergence of Bitcoin interest and crypto interest through digital credit. So I think that the industry's moving together with more enthusiasm than any time I can remember.

Yeah. I think the summary of the call is that the company has lots of different treasury operations that it can engage in, and many, many assets to manage. And we were working to communicate all the various trades and all the various capital markets activities that we thought were rational, in the best interest of the shareholders. At the high level, the company balances the interest of the equity holders with the capital investors, with the credit investors. Bitcoin is capital. We're always interested in what's good for Bitcoin. STRC is credit. We're interested in what's good for the digital credit. And then MSTR is equity, digital equity, and we're interested in what's good for them. Traditionally, we've been engaged in just a few simple activities. We sold equity to buy Bitcoin, and then we sold credit to buy Bitcoin, and most of the world just focuses upon that. But now we've reached the point where we want to accelerate the growth, improve the balance sheet. So one of the aspects we covered was our bonds. We have six convertible bonds. We told the market previously we won't sell them, but now we've moved beyond that we won't sell bonds anymore to we think it's time to retire the bonds. And we have options to retire the bonds that we didn't have a year ago. Stretch didn't exist, but STRC's been so successful at generating billions and billions of dollars of capital for us that we have options, like we could swap the STRC for the bonds. And many of the bonds are very much undervalued. They're over-the-counter bonds, and because they trade over the counter, it's impossible for retail or public investors to buy them, and so they trade at a deep discount to their fair value.

I mean, the senior bond is somewhere between 50 and 80 times over collateralized. So in theory, it's almost a risk-free bond. And so if you have the analytics to calculate the credit spreads on these bonds, which it's complicated to calculate them because they have a very substantial warrant component to them, your conclusion is that, yeah, they're all investment-grade, and they should all be trading at a substantial premium to par. And most of them do, but not all of them do. But coming back to the investor call, I think the real point there is the company's reached the point where it makes sense for us to think about retiring the bonds using STRC proceeds. The company, because that's a big asset of the company now, the option to sell Stretch.

Well, I mean, the truth is, if they're all exactly the same, they're all exactly the same. When we calculate the impact on Bitcoin per share, we're always looking for things that create yield. So we would prioritize trades that create more Bitcoin per share. And if we can create 10X more Bitcoin per share, we'd prioritize that first. So for example, if the common equity trades at a massive discount to parity or fair value, then that becomes an interesting trade, and the trade could either be we trade dollars for the stock, we trade Bitcoin for the stock, or we trade credit, STRC, for the stock. And each of those has a different characteristic. So what we presented in the earnings call was two things. We presented the options we have in front of us, and then we also presented the metrics we use to make the decision. The options are to retire the debt earlier, to buy back the stock, or to buy Bitcoin. Generally those three. The way in which we do it is do we use dollars, do we use Bitcoin, do we use credit, or do we use equity? We have all of these things. And then the metrics we use are equity and credit metrics. So the first question is, what's the yield, the BTC yield? The benefit to the common equity shareholder? So if there is no yield, then it's equity neutral. If there's a negative yield, it's dilutive. If there's a positive yield, it's accretive. And then the second metric is credit. What is the impact on the credit of the company? Does it create more risk on the balance sheet? For example, if we used all of our dollars to buy back stock, it would be equity positive, it would create a yield, but it would be credit negative. And so the market price of the stock, of Bitcoin, of all of our credit instruments, of all of our bonds, is changing every day. And from day to day, we adjust our capital markets activity in order to take advantage of yield opportunities, and then to meet any of our liabilities. So the primary thing we're doing, we're raising 20 to 30 billion of capital a year. And so when we're raising the 20 to 30 billion in capital, the issue is, are we buying Bitcoin or are we adding dollar reserves, or should we go and buy the debt, or should we go and increase the reserve, or should we buy our equity? So this is the primary, the first order thing we do, and this is where we generate... You know, if we generate $10 billion of BTC gain, on a Bitcoin standard, that's like $10 billion of net income. So the first order interest of the company is to generate the net income equivalent for the equity. The second order impact, or the second order obligation is, well, we have about a billion and a half dollars of dividends, so we have to decide how will we fund the dividends. Shall we use dollars? Will we use common stock? Will we use Bitcoin? And what we laid out to our investors is we have a lot of options for meeting obligations. We have a lot of different trades. We can go fast. We can go slower. We have the option very often to do very little. You know, we could, for example, turn the engine down by a factor of 20, or we can crank the engine up. And so we presented our enterprise equity models and risks models so that the investors will understand how we think about it, and we wanted to communicate that we've traditionally run on about three engines, and now we're expanding to about eight engines, so we have many, many more engines of growth that we can deploy in order to create shareholder value.

I didn't expect Bitcoin to, you know, the price of Bitcoin to change at all on that announcement. You know, the truth is, if we were to fund all of our dividends exclusively by selling Bitcoin over the next year, we would buy 21 Bitcoin for every one Bitcoin we sold. And so it's no different than buying 20 Bitcoin and selling no Bitcoin, buying 21 Bitcoin and selling one Bitcoin. So it's kind of a big nothing burger from an economic point of view. And then from a market point of view, the Bitcoin market has somewhere between 20 and $50 billion of liquidity today. And if we were to fund all of our dividends with Bitcoin, you would be talking about 3 million. It would be divide three into 50,000, right? If you can do the math in your head of what is three 50,000th of the market, it's not, you know, measurable. It's immeasurable. So it's really inconsequential. You know, the whole reason we're confident about Bitcoin is because it's a global market. We have announced we're gonna buy 42 billion of Bitcoin, the market goes nowhere. We have literally bought 200 million an hour, the market does not, the price does not move up. We have stopped buying. We have bought 200 million an hour for four hours and turned it off, and the price trades up. You know? And so the truth is, the market has its own dynamic, and we are a part of it, but we're definitely not driving the price. It's really more driven by macroeconomics, I think.

That's an ignorant criticism that trends on X, but the people that observe it really aren't deep thinkers, nor do they analyze things. What's going on here is when we're buying Bitcoin with an equity swap, it's because the equity rallied and then there's a massive equity premium. And if you actually thought about it, you would realize that when Bitcoin surges, the equity surges, and the premium expands, and it actually becomes more profitable for us to... And we're not buying, we're swapping. We're swapping a share of MSTR for a share of BTC when the premium expands, and that's when the Bitcoin rallies. So in a week of 168 hours, there might be three hours that week during which the market's rallied, and we might do $250 million of swaps in the three hours. So yes, we're picking the top of the Bitcoin market, but we're also picking the top of the equity capital market and swapping the two of them, and we're actually generating a much larger gain. So we're making money for our shareholders risk-free by doing these swaps. If we wanted to do those swaps when the price is low, when the price is low, the premium is low. The truth is it makes much less money, or we would lose money for the common by swapping the equity when the Bitcoin price is low. So that's why it sort of appears that we might be buying the top, but we're not buying it with money that's been sitting around. We're swapping equity at a premium which is exploding when we're doing it. And so we do that because it's equity positive. When the equity premium is compressing, and our equity's underperforming, we exit the market to support the equity, because the last thing in the world you would wanna do is sell equity when your equity is underperforming the Bitcoin. Now, the Stretch dynamic is different. When STRC hits par and is trading at 100, we are selling STRC, and we are buying Bitcoin, and we are hedging that in the hour. So if someone actually buys $100 million of Stretch at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, we're buying $100 million of Bitcoin at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday. And you'll see when our purchases are based upon selling the credit, probably the price we get is the price in the market at the time we're selling the credit, because we wanna always stay hedged. And when the purchases are based on equity sales, we're probably getting the price of Bitcoin when the equity premium in our stock was the highest. And generally, our view is we want to always stay long exposed Bitcoin. We don't really trade the market. If we have a certain amount of Bitcoin per share, if we're doing anything, we're increasing Bitcoin per share. So what we wouldn't do, for example, is we're not really enthusiastic about selling a billion dollars of equity, not buying the Bitcoin, and then waiting to see if we get a better price. Because if we were to do that, it creates opacity and uncertainty, and that's really not good for the derivatives traders that make a living trading our stock. It's not good for our equity investors. We are in business because people trust us and we are transparent. And that's why we have the largest spot liquidity for an equity. MSTR trades more than IBIT, and that's why we have the largest open interest in the options market. It's because everybody knows we're going to stay directionally long. If we start to act random, or we start to act like a retail trader who gets up every day and thinks, 'Well, you know, maybe I'll do this, maybe I won't,' well, that's a rational thing for a retail trader or an individual trader, but it's actually irrational for a public company. We are creating securities that 10 million other people are trading, or 10,000 other traders are trading. Our job is to be consistent and transparent and predictable to make their job easy. And if we start to be not consistent, we make their life hell. And so if the company were to do something that was opposite of what they expected, that's like a rug pull, they would take all their money and go home and say, 'Well, we're just not gonna trade this anymore because we can't... we don't know what the company's gonna do.' So when we have earnings calls like this, we're communicating to all those investors, the bond holders, the credit holders, the equity holders, the derivative, the call options, the put options. We're communicating to everybody, this is what we expect to do. Now, you can create your trading strategy. And there's no greater compliment, by the way, than someone that says, 'Oh, I took a billion-dollar short position because I trusted you, not to unwind yours,' right? Or, 'I took a bil-' They're betting a billion dollars. The day of our earnings call, the largest options trade in the entire US stock market was an MSTR call option trade placed by a derivatives trader, like more than anybody. And so that is a burden of trust we carry. And so we try not to be traders. We're not being cute. We're not dancing around. When we're swapping credit and equity instruments, we're doing it algorithmically so that, like, I don't wanna go to bed short where I'm like, 'Oh, I'm a billion dollars short,' and Bitcoin rallies $8,000 and, oh, and now I gotta buy it $8,000 higher. Right? It's like that's not the business we're in, you know. We're not traders. We don't take that kind of risk. We're very methodic in the way we operate our capital markets programs.

We, you know, we have the option to capture that up to $2.2 billion tax credit. The value of the credit's changing every day, every minute, right? And we also have the option to calculate the mispricing of the convertible bonds, and there's a massive yield in that. We also have the option to capture Bitcoin in a trade. We make that decision week by week, day by day. Generally, on a weekly basis we think strategically. And on a daily basis, we make our capital markets decisions. And we may, we may not. Everything we do precludes us doing something else. And so we always have to consider, you know, is this equity positive but credit negative? Or maybe it's screamingly good for the equity. It makes us $500 million, but it's a little bit bad for the credit. And so would I do that? Well, if the credit was super strong, then I would do something equity positive, slightly credit negative. If the credit was super weak, we wouldn't. Right? So sometimes we do things that are equity negative, that create a negative yield. For example, last year we raised $2.25 billion in US dollars. That was a negative yield, but it was important to bring the credit to life. And so...

We normally sit in money markets. So we're in the same T-bill money markets that anybody else with a large amount of corporate cash would be in. I think the point to be made there is if we think we need to support the credit, we do it. When we did it, it was equity negative, but then in the first four months of this year, we generated $5 billion of credit sales, and we generated a four to a $5 billion Bitcoin gain. That's a net income equivalent. If you think Bitcoin's gone up 11% a year, when we book a $5 billion BTC gain, it's 5 billion in net income. If you think Bitcoin's gone up 22% a year, it's 5 billion in net income with another 5 billion coming over the next seven years. And if you think Bitcoin's going up 30% a year, it's 5 billion up front, 10 billion on the back end. So sometimes we trade off a negative in the present to get a positive in the future. But on the other hand, if the credit markets change, then we might go back to the equity, and then the Bitcoin market's also of an impact. So we have to weigh all of these things. I think the real message for the marketplace is, we think about the equity, we think about the credit, we think about the Bitcoin. Everything we do, over the long term, it's certainly Bitcoin positive. You know, we bought $62 billion of Bitcoin. We're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. We will probably be, continue to be, ad infinitum, the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. In the near term, there's a lot of volatility, and if you look, the stock traded down 70% at one point.

Yeah. In the near term, there's a lot of volatility in the equity, and there's some volatility in the credit. So the things that are moving that we have to manage week by week, month by month, are normally the credit equity balance. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's generally just a slow-driving drill bit. We just keep cranking that, and the issue is just are we doing 20 billion a year or 30 billion a year or 10 billion a year or 50 billion a year? And the rate at which we do all these things is a function of the equity capital markets, the macro economy, the credit markets, and the crypto capital markets, the Bitcoin market. And we are a player, but at the end of the day, macro headwinds, trade wars, hot wars, currency wars are the big boss. And then industry dynamics like the passage of clarity, banking credit, they're also a factor. And then our execution on digital credit is the third factor. And if we ran the business just for the credit, it'd be not good for the equity. The equity would trade at a discount to MNAV, and if that happens, then the credit doesn't work over the long term. So we have to always be thinking about the harmony and the equilibrium between what's credit positive, what's equity positive. And if we hit the right balance, everybody wins. It's great for the credit, it's great for the equity, it's great for Bitcoin. And when we... If we get it wrong, if we're unhealthy and we fall out of balance, then we won't sell any credit. The equity premiums fall, and we won't buy much Bitcoin, and so it's bad for all three constituencies. And so that's how we think.

We have evolved through about 15 iterations of capital markets activity over the last five years, and we've lived through, you know, it's like four bear markets where we had big drawdowns. I think in a bull market, the equity runs, and it's a fairly easy business. It's, you know, in a bull market it's easy for everybody. Everything works. And we had a bull market like after the November elections in '24, and we sold $21 billion of equity at something like an MNAV of two to three, it was like a 50% dilution placement or something. At that, I mean, we basically sold $21 billion of equity and created a $14 billion Bitcoin gain in a matter of weeks. It was insane, it was a go-go time. And so in a bear market, we've been in a bear market for about six, seven months. There the credit, you know, is the idea. But what we found is bonds wouldn't work in a bear market. STRC, digital credit, if properly managed, does work in a bear market. And so we've been able to use STRC in order to drive Bitcoin yield and Bitcoin acquisition in the bear market. Now, we've never had... And by the way, so we invented our way to drag ourself out of a bear market, right? STRC was, like, the 14th thing we invented. After we'd done, you know, they say Americans do the right thing after they've done everything else, right? After we'd done 14 other things, we finally found Stretch, and Stretch started working in just in the past three months. It's working pretty well. But we have not ever had a bull market where we had the equity engine firing, and we also had the credit engine firing, and we had all the open market activities working. And so I think that the best is yet to come. We're looking forward to that bull market where we'll be able to actively use all these tools. And the other observation, we've got four other prefs, Strike, Stride, Strife, Stream. Those are really bull market-type things, and if a bull market comes, they actually should become interesting programs for us.

The European markets are fragmented. There's, like, 18 different capital markets. There's 18 regulators. There's 18 different exchanges. And you would think that the EU would've consolidated all that. That did not happen. It's all very balkanized. Here's what I've learned. The most advanced, sophisticated capital markets in the world are the US. The US has preferred stocks. It has shelf registrations. It has flexible shelf registrations for preferred stocks. It has a lot of liquidity. It has sophisticated banking, sophisticated distribution. It has a single currency, single language, single set of regulators that, you know, it has pretty stable, flexible exchanges like Nasdaq. When you go to other parts of the world, they're not progressive. They don't have shelf registrations.

They don't move quickly. We have a natural advantage in the US because we're a well-known seasoned issuer, a WKS, which means that that's a designation given to publicly traded companies in the US that have been in the market for a long time. They're a well-known seasoned issuer, literally what the words suggest. It means you can file a registration statement, and you can sell securities the next day or the day of. So you can go very quickly. Going to the UK, we might wait a year. Going to Japan, we might have to set up a company and wait three years. And so when we did the Stream deal in Europe, we listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. It was the most flexible. But it's not a transparent exchange. You don't... I barely see a bid and an ask. It's more like an OTC market, which surprised me, but after the fact. It's not terribly liquid. It's not transparent. It's not very functional. And so we've worked to list on other exchanges in Europe. It's slow going. Working through regulators. You have to get regulator permissions, exchange permissions. My conclusion is that 80% of all the capital in the world's gonna circulate on US capital markets, that the big winner here is the US. The big loser is every other nation. Right? And it's just if you strategically make your markets not work, money is fungible, and so the money just flows to the market where it does work. And right now, the two most advanced markets in the world are USA and UAE, but they're the most progressive. But at the end of the day, the USA has the combination of issuer power, liquidity, progressive regulations, and good infrastructure. And so it is the market that's growing the fastest and will grow the fastest, I would anticipate.

So you ended up an investor in MSTR, my company.

Because you didn't have an alternative in your country.

I... To this day, I meet lots of Brits, lots of people from the UK, and they say, 'Yeah, you know, I discovered your stock in 2020 because we couldn't buy Bitcoin.' You didn't have to be a genius. It's, you know, which is interesting. So we ended up with a lot of investors and a lot of fans from places that I had no idea. Like, how do they even know we exist? And it was because we were a proxy that they could get to. You know, we see the same thing with Stretch right now, which is Vanguard won't let you buy Bitcoin, but they'll let you buy STRC, or let you buy MSTR. And so...

Well, that's what we found out. So when you buy Stretch, it's the same as the US, which is one of the advantages that we've had.

At the end of the day, it's a reason why you need to have securities like a digital equity and a digital credit. I mean, if you're a Bitcoin maxi, what they don't realize is there are a lot of people that have money stranded or tied up in accounts where they need to buy a security, and there are either tax benefits or they literally cannot buy the commodity. They can't buy the crypto commodity. They have to buy a security that's listed on a Vanguard or listed in a retirement account in the UK. I meet people in Europe and they're like, 'Oh, I have money in a retirement account and I was able to get into your stock, but I couldn't get it to BTC.' So we're offering a useful function to the world, among other things.

I think you have to just look at it in full monthly cycles because we won't know how much STRC we sold in May until the full end of the cycle. You know, because it could be 100 million in a day, it could be a billion in a day, it could be two billion in a day. And I've watched it, you know, like, we sold $120 million at 3:59 and 57 seconds. Like, we're at three seconds before the market closes. And there's a blip, and an extra $120 million crosses the wire in one second. So you don't really know what's gonna happen until the end. So I don't know what the forecast is.

Yeah, I'm flattered, but I don't think that's why it traded down. I think it traded down because of the flare up in the Gulf War, right? And the Iranian war, and the crisis in the Straits of Hormuz, and foreign policy, and trade policy. The macroeconomic effects generally trump any microeconomic thing. I mean, our announcement would be a mark to market, and it's not even news. You can literally mark our Bitcoin to market every 15 seconds.

There is no news there. The news generally is a presidential tweet or either a loosening in trade tension or a tightening in trade tension. And that drives massive levered 50X, 100X trades, short and long.

But any event, but let's come back to February, because the point is January was about 500 million. February, we had a massive Bitcoin crash and a ratcheting up in macro tensions, and we only did 70 million. It's almost like the credit markets seized up. In March, everything got a bit better and people relaxed, and then we had a $1.5 billion month. And then in April, that went to 3.2 billion. So if you were drawing a straight line, if you didn't have the macro headwind, it might've been 500 million to a billion to 1.5 billion to 3.2 billion, which you would think would be about rational. But now we have to watch and see what happens in May, June, and July. And the question really, like 1.5 billion is an $18 billion run rate, which we'd be totally happy with. If we had sold $18 billion, if we told you we were gonna do $18 billion in credit and probably $18 billion in BTC gains this year, you'd be like, 'Whoa, that's good.' And then when it went to 3.2, that's a $38 billion run rate. So now we're sitting between 18 billion and 38 billion. In May, June, July, if it's somewhere in the middle, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It'll be perfectly fine. Will it go, will it grow? Will it shrink? We really can't know, 'cause a lot of time, if you're a credit investor, if you wanted to buy a billion dollars of this instrument, there's no difference between if you buy it today, you'll get a three cent discount. It's trading at $99.97.

And if you wait until 3:59 and 58 seconds on the last day, you would pay $100, or maybe you could buy a billion dollars of this at $100 and one penny if you wait till the last minute. So the truth of the matter is, maybe you just wanna wait till the last minute, and that's what we saw last month. So speculating linearly makes no sense. You know, why is it trading the way it is? I'm probably pleased with the way it's trading because it's basically traded with a 99 handle ever since our dividend record date.

Yeah, which I think is important because it's trading in the 99 to 100 range, and so it's perfectly healthy.

Yeah. Let me finish with the other point that I wanna make, which is we sold $3.2 billion in a couple of weeks on an instrument with a basis of, like, 5 billion. So we expanded the supply by a huge factor, by 3 billion on a $5 billion number. So it was a massive month over month growth. And so it doesn't surprise me that it takes a while for the market to digest that, right? Some of that was certainly people that were buying a billion to clip a 90 cent dividend, and then they're ready to sell, and then they're coming back. So the way it trades is gonna be a function of the growth rate. If it was growing 20%, it would trade much closer to par with much less of a drawdown, I think. But if it's growing 200%, there's gonna be more pressure. And we're at almost a 400% rate. So given the hypergrowth, it doesn't surprise me that it's digesting that. I think it's actually behaving pretty well, and over the past few days it's trading with a five cent spread, you know, five cent daily range and a three cent daily range yesterday. So all of that's comfortable. Now coming to your next question. We think that... I mean, the dividend rate seems healthy right now. Our bias is to grow the business. You know, the more capital we raise, the more BTC gain we generate, the more Bitcoin we buy, the higher the Bitcoin price goes. So generally, if the credit demand remains strong, that's probably because Bitcoin is strong. And if Bitcoin rallies, our collateral base will grow. And so if all of those things are growing in harmony, then we'll just continue with that growth path. I would rather buy $40 billion of Bitcoin, issue $40 billion of credit, and pay 11.5% than buy $10 billion of Bitcoin, issue $10 billion of credit and pay 9.5%. You see, so we're, you know, at the end of the day, we kind of view this as we're in the growth stage. And the analogy is, like, Amazon offered free shipping that people said, 'Well, they must be losing money on this.' And they did it for, like, seven years or a long time, until every household in the United States was an Amazon customer. And then when every household in the United States was an Amazon customer and they had won the market, then they raised the price of Amazon Prime and people are like, 'Oh, wow, that's obscenely profitable.' Right? So I think right now we're offering a dividend which is more than the fair credit spread. I mean, if you believe that Bitcoin is appreciating 10 to 15% a year, if it's better, it's slightly better than the S&P, then our credit should be investment-grade. So investment-grade credit spread is 80 basis points, and we're obviously paying a lot more than investment-grade. So we're offering, we're overdriving the market, and it's good for the credit investors, it's good for us, it's good for Bitcoin. And the real issue is how is the equity capital market gonna react, and how is the Bitcoin market react? And so if we sell a lot of credit and we buy a lot of Bitcoin and Bitcoin is healthy and the equity is healthy, then we run the engine as hard, in fifth gear.