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Michael Saylor
Executive Chairman, MicroStrategy Inc.

$1.5M Bitcoin Is Coming (Saylor's $300T Plan)

🎥 Jun 12, 2026 📺 BTCPrague and Bitcoin Corporate Day ⏱ 67m 👁 80087 views
Saylor just laid out his entire $300 trillion Bitcoin plan on stage at Bitcoin Corporate Day. $30 trillion target. 25X from current price. $1.5M per Bitcoin in the math Bitcoin Corporate Day 2026 in London 🗓️ September 22 Mark your calendars! Request Access: 🎟️ https://www.bitcoincorporateday.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Saylor & Cole Take the Stage 1:28 The State of the Bitcoin Market 5:33 Bitcoin Dominance Hits 70% 7:25 The Three Doors: Save, Invest, Build 9:25 Bitcoin Is Money. Everything Else Is Credit. 10:29 Digital Capital, Digital Credit, Digital Money 12:30 The $300 Tri...
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About Michael Saylor

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, has continued to promote Bitcoin as "digital capital" and to argue for the expansion of credit markets backed by Bitcoin. In mid-2026, during a bear market that saw Bitcoin drop from $120,000 to $60,000, Saylor defended his company's sale of 32 Bitcoin, stating that the company had net purchased roughly 250,000 Bitcoin over the same period. He characterized critics who objected to the sale as "Twitter trolls" and argued that "never sell your Bitcoin" is advice for individual investors, not for a publicly traded company structured to issue credit. Saylor has introduced and promoted a company instrument called STRC (Stretch), a preferred stock that he described as a "digital credit" product offering an 11.5% tax-deferred yield. He stated that the product is designed to funnel capital from traditional credit markets into Bitcoin, and described it as the "killer app" for a corporate Bitcoin treasury. Saylor has repeatedly said that Bitcoin could eventually reach $7 million per coin, arguing that the total capital need for a global digital asset could be $100 trillion. He urged regulatory reforms such as revising Basel rules to allow banks to hold Bitcoin. He described Strategy's role as a "shock absorber" in the market and said the company would continue to be the world's largest corporate buyer of Bitcoin. Saylor also stated he was prepared to sell Bitcoin to fund STRC dividends if necessary, though he said the company would buy "10 to 20 more" for each one sold. He dismissed speculation that Strategy posed a systemic risk to the market, and said he expects a capital rotation back into Bitcoin by the end of 2026.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Michael Saylor's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (40 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
M
Michael Saylor0:00
We want five or 10% of all the credit in the world. So if the credit's 300 trillion, we want 15 to 30 trillion of it to flow into Bitcoin-backed credit instruments. We want 5, 10, 20, 30% of all the money markets in the world to flow into digital money. There's 1 trillion in Bitcoin and there's 1,000 trillion elsewhere. Digital capital is competitive with metallic capital, real estate capital, equity capital, and credit capital. What is money? Well, gold is money. Everything else is credit according to JP Morgan 100 years ago. Bitcoin is money. Everything else is credit according to Michael Saylor.
I
Interviewer0:45
Why don't we just start? I guess your assessment of Bitcoin, digital capital, the entire Bitcoin market right now quickly.
M
Michael Saylor0:56
Yeah. On Bitcoin, I think we're in a classic bear market. I think it's a really mild bear market by Bitcoin standards to date. I think interestingly you would think about an issuer of digital credit, someone that tries to amplify Bitcoin exposure. And I just can't wait to get into the answers to the questions from the last panel. But I would expect in a Bitcoin bear market when Bitcoin's at its 200-week moving average for capital markets for someone like us to be largely shut. That was our assumption. Two weeks ago we had the largest Bitcoin buy in our history. Bought over 200 Bitcoin. The week before, 1100 Bitcoin. For us that's massive raises. Even last week we bought 32 Bitcoin, which if you know, you know.
I
Interviewer1:50
You know Matt, I'm gonna want the 32 Bitcoin back.
M
Michael Saylor1:54
The price may be higher. But I think the capital market's open, which means that the bear scenarios for us are less bad than I think they could have been and that we were prepared for. And so we're ready to weather the storm. I think digital credit is behaving really well. It's interesting to note that Bitcoin is down over 50% since its high. Right now, both SEDA and STRC have had positive total returns during a Bitcoin bear market. And if you think about that as a capital allocator, someone that wants to buy something that has reduced volatility, that has income, that is success in my view. So to me, all systems go, we're in a bear market, we'll weather the storm and we'll get out. What's your perspective?
M
Matt2:41
Yeah. So, you know, I think clearly what October 6, Bitcoin's 125,000 a coin. Right now, everybody knows it's like half of that. So we got a 50-51% drawdown. In that same time frame, to your point, total return on STRK is plus 3-4%. It's positive. Total return on SATA, it's positive. So people wonder why do you need digital credit? Well, can you actually invest your family's capital or your corporation's capital and live through a 50% drawdown in the underlying asset and not lose your principle? You need credit. If you look at the stats, right? So Bitcoin falls 50%, the credit holds par or maybe generates somewhat of a positive return. The equity is, you know, my equity is off 75% so it's amplified. The other period that I've looked at is May 14th. Right on May 14th, the markets just fell off a cliff. Bitcoin was 82,000 on May 14th and now it's fallen to 21,000. So Bitcoin falls about 25%. Our equity falls about 40%. The credit's off 3%. It'll be a total return of 2% or something like that. So what we've done, I think, with digital credit is I think we've shown we can successfully strip 90% of the volatility. Maybe we're all shooting for 95% of the V to be stripped off, but let's just say 90% of the V approximately is stripped off. Bitcoin was 40 V for the last 12 months and then it actually tailed down to 30 V on a rolling 30-day basis and then it was 28 and then we thought this was too good to be true and then it spiked up and now it's 40 V on a 30-day basis and 40 V on a trailing one-year basis. So Bitcoin has proven that it's volatile capital and it's digital capital. I think the story on Bitcoin is Bitcoin dominance keeps growing. If you chart Bitcoin, crypto dominance as percent of market cap of all the crypto assets, taking out the stable coins like Tether and Circle, Bitcoin hit a low of about 41% in the height of the FTX era like 2021 and then Bitcoin has been grinding up from 40% and now it's like 68-69%ish. So Bitcoin dominance is now getting close to 70% of all the market cap in the entire crypto market and confidence in Ethereum has collapsed if you're paying attention. What you see in the rest of the crypto market is there's a competition between Ethereum, Solana, BNB. For a long time, SUI was the next Solana and then that collapsed and now there's hype HyperLiquid and then there's competition at the layer twos with Arbitrum and Base and all of those things have stripped the monetary premium out of all those crypto tokens. And I think that even the people that believe in the tokens realize that they're not money. They're not going to have a monetary premium. They're going to live or die based on utility. And they're all in a difficult competition. So I think the last 12 months have been really good for the position of Bitcoin as the dominant digital monetary network. They've established Bitcoin as digital capital. I think we've proven digital credit is an idea that works. And at this point the market loses its mind at the bottom of a bear market and so there's a lot of sound and fury. But if you look beyond that and you're here at Bitcoin for Corporations, you're a corporation. So I tell you, you want to make billions but you want to save money, then you buy digital capital or you buy digital credit. That's how you save money. If you want to invest money, then you invest in combination of digital capital, digital equity, digital credit, or you leverage it to create digital yield or you do something like that. You're an investor. If you want to make money, you have no money, you want to make billions of dollars, and you've got like three people and you started a company. If you want to make money, then the smartest idea is to create a form of digital money or a form of digital yield or digital income based on digital credit, right? And I think that's the next interesting topic. And there are 10,000 opportunities, each one of them a billion dollar opportunity to create a digital product, a new digital asset, digital fund, or a digital service that's all based upon emerging market opportunities. And although digital credit is not the only source of energy and opportunity, it's certainly the most obvious and the most scalable one in a hurry right now. I think something to go a layer deeper on just because you see the confusion online is what is digital money because I think the confusion is people think that we're saying digital credit or something built on digital credit is better than Bitcoin and that's not the case. So maybe could you help define when you say digital money what is your vision for that?
M
Michael Saylor8:33
That's a good point. If you put on the Austrian economic hat and you look what is money? Well, gold is money. Everything else is credit according to JP Morgan 100 years ago. Bitcoin is money. Everything else is credit according to Michael Saylor 100 weeks ago. That is true, right? Everything else has counterparty risk and Bitcoin is the form of capital which doesn't have that. So that's the Austrian school of thought or the Bitcoin standard and that's how you would use money. But if you go to the fiat school of thought and the Keynesian standard, the way they think of money is it's something that has zero volatility to a fiat currency. So if you look at the seven trillion dollars of money or the trillions of dollars in a money market fund, it has to be zero V generating yield pegged to a fiat currency whether it's euros or dollars. So when we describe a digital asset stack with digital capital, that is a fiat term. We're basically saying digital capital is competitive with metallic capital, real estate capital, equity capital, and credit capital. Digital capital is a fiat term. Bitcoin is much more than that, right? When we say digital credit, that's a fiat term. It's digital credit competing with mortgage-backed credit, junk credit, private credit, sovereign credit, investment-grade corporate credit, etc. When we use the word digital money, it's a fiat term. It means zero V digital currency with zero volatility backed by Bitcoin that pays a yield. So why would we call it digital money? Well, because 99.9% of all the capital in the world is on a fiat standard. There's one trillion in Bitcoin and there's 1,000 trillion elsewhere. And so there might be a few gold bugs that would agree with me that gold is money and Bitcoin is money and everything else is credit and they would say money markets are not money. Maybe a few, but for the most part, everybody with the capital in the world that we need to attract and bridge into Bitcoin, they think money is a zero volatility USD or euro or JPY denominated fund or asset that pays some kind of yield. And so what we're building, Matt and I and other people that are building on this, whether it's like people like Saturn or Apex, they're building either digital yield or they're building digital money and we're building digital credit on top of digital capital. And the objective is pretty simple, right? We want five or 10% of all the credit in the world. So if the credit's 300 trillion, we want 15 to 30 trillion of it to flow into Bitcoin-backed credit instruments and then we want 5, 10, 20, 30% of all the money markets in the world to flow into digital money, right? And at the end of the day, the conventional view of money is money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value. And if you ask how do you become a medium of exchange? Well, if you go and crawl the web, you'll find that 99.9999% of all the prices in the world are denominated in fiat currencies. I didn't make it that way. It just turns out that 99.9999% of all the prices are US dollars or euros or yen. So if you want to create perfect money in the eyes of the people that have the $1,000 trillion dollars, and they're the only ones that matter because they have the money and we need the capital, their idea is it's pegged to the dollar with zero V, right? Because that way I can exchange it friction-free without a tax hit in order to convert it into a currency and pay for anything. And it's in dollars which is the unit of account of every accounting system of every multinational in the world has been and will be, and it pays you a yield which is in excess of the monetary debasement rate, which means that if you can get above 7% then you've got a perfect store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account in the eyes of every non-Bitcoin maximalist in the world, and it's their opinion that matters if you're actually trying to sell something to them. And so when I say digital money, I mean zero volatility pegged to a fiat currency that pays a yield. And it's got to be backed by Bitcoin if you're going to do it in an economically sound, technically sound, ethically sound fashion.
M
Matt14:00
Yeah. And that was kind of to me the breakthrough moment with digital credit where you think about all the normal people in society that just are volatility adverse. And the reality is that probably this room has most people that are not adverse to volatility. And I think we're a bunch of sickos in a certain sense that volatility just does not bother us at all. But how do you take that to the masses? And what do the masses really need? I think to Michael's point, something that has minimal V that outpaces the rate of currency debasement and there's only one asset that can back something that provides that solution and it's Bitcoin. And so we take that to the masses not to say it's a replacement for Bitcoin at all. It's to say where are people, what are their needs, how do you meet their needs and provide a solution to their problems. And it's why as someone that's issuing digital credit, our audience now is really no longer Bitcoiners. We come here to talk about how to grow this ecosystem together, how to be partners in this ecosystem, how to grow the Bitcoin network together, how to win together, but really the audience is people that are likely not invested in Bitcoin, or if they are, they're not selling their Bitcoin to buy digital credit. They're selling maybe their money market account or maybe they're moving money out of a checking account into digital credit because they like that solution or buying digital money something on top of digital credit. And I think that's the thing that maybe is hard for some people that aren't deep in the weeds to understand. But when you're out there actually talking with people, it is so clear. And I think not only is it so clear, it's so clear also how big this idea is, which I think is why we talk about it pretty much every single day.
M
Michael Saylor15:45
Yeah. I think a lot of I have a big following with regard to Bitcoin believers and Bitcoin fundamentalists, and the like. And somehow a lot of times the misnomer is they somehow think that we're encouraging people not to buy Bitcoin or self-custody when we're selling SATA or selling STRK. And the truth is I never met anybody that owned STRK that actually thought it was a substitute for owning Bitcoin. Just about everybody that I've ever met that bought it bought it in lieu of holding money market or holding a credit instrument or having money invested in S&P ETFs or some other equity. So the people that we're finding are non-Bitcoin holders or we're attracting pools of capital. If you're a Bitcoiner and you need the money in the next 12 months to pay your kids' tuition, well, only half of your children would have got to school this year, right? The other half would have to stay home because of the 50% drawdown. So there's a lot of people that believe in Bitcoin, but they're not going to put 100% of all their family's capital into it. They're always going to need to hold back some portion. So we're providing really an alternative to JPMorgan or to PFF or to your favorite bank's money market fund that pays 2%. And that's the competition right now. All these new products just like with the tokens people get worked over some like Saturn and Apex. There's nobody that's buying Saturn or Apex that would otherwise have bought Bitcoin and held it in cold storage. These are basically Asian, Chinese, off-the-grid, South American, African crypto investors and they're buying those yield coins instead of Tether, right? They're either holding a stable coin which is 80% backed by currency equivalents or you're holding a 100% backed compliant stable coin that pays zero because you're from Turkey or you're from South Africa or fill in the blank. Every single place you're either holding that or you're going to buy a yield coin backed by Bitcoin. And so when you think about it, don't think that none of these things compete with the underlying capital asset. All they're doing is expanding the network. The real competition is for the $999 trillion of capital that's either invested in the TradFi economy or right now for the $350-400 billion, what do you buy if you want yield in crypto? You buy Solana or Ethereum or you buy a Bitcoin-backed token powered by digital credit. So those tokens are competing with Solana, Ethereum, the other crypto yields or they're competing with stable coins that generate yield from trading crypto like Athena or they're competing with stable coins that pay no yield. And so when you create these products, you're expanding the market and you're drawing more capital into the base layer, which is good for Bitcoin. And you're also creating an opportunity like if you're a Chinese investor, how the heck are you supposed to actually invest your money and get paid, especially if you just can't stand the volatility. And I think Matt, you've been selling Bitcoin longer, but trust me, I have spent thousands of hours of my life selling Bitcoin to corporations and individuals, and it is a large effort. You know when we pitched it to Microsoft, did we get like 1% of the vote? It was 0.1% of the shareholders voted for it. It's a very challenging effort to convince corporations and most individuals to invest in a 40 V asset. On the other hand, everybody's interested in something that pays them two to four times more than the money market if you can strip the volatility off it. So we actually think that if you want to grow Bitcoin by a factor of 10 or a hundred, you're not going to do it by preaching to people or even educating them. Trust me, we've spent more money educating than ever. If we actually spent a hundred billion dollars a year educating people on Bitcoin, we wouldn't grow the market as rapidly as we're doing it with digital credit right now. Because at the end of the day, the right product spreads virally word of mouth. People just tell their mothers, fathers, sisters, uncles, buy the thing. And the world is not ready for 40 V, 30 or 40 V asset for most of that capital. No matter, it's not a matter of education. It's just they don't have that much capital that can handle that V in that pocket and that can buy a commodity.
I
Interviewer21:24
Maybe switching gears a little bit to some of the last questions in the last panel about managing an amplified Bitcoin treasury strategy in a Bitcoin bear market, issuing shares. Is it dilutive? Is it accretive? Maybe some of your thoughts just on that. I have thoughts too, but maybe start with you.
M
Michael Saylor21:48
Sure. So it turns out if you want to invest in the equity of a publicly traded company and you want to do it responsibly, you have to actually have an attention span, which means you have to read the filings and look at the conference calls. There are 100,000 pages of SEC filings on our company and there's thousands of pages that cover the balance sheet and what we've done, what we're going to do. So if you're assessing our business, for example, a lot of misnomers fly around. The idea that selling equity is dilutive is a misnomer. The truth is it's massively accretive. If you calculate assets per share after or net assets per share after adjusting for the liabilities, everything we're doing is accretive whether we swap equity for Bitcoin or swap equity for cash. So that's the first observation. A second, the actual gain or loss on the Bitcoin position is totally irrelevant if you actually bought the Bitcoin substantially with equity. If you sell, all of the Bitcoin we purchased was 80% of it was equity. So at all points in time, we sold it at a premium that was higher than the net asset value. So we sold I think we raised $21 billion of equity in a matter of months in 2024. We did it at a premium of 200% over the Bitcoin. So we raised 21 billion of equity. We bought 21 billion of Bitcoin. We banked a 14 billion Bitcoin gain. It doesn't matter whether the Bitcoin trades down 30%, you would show a $4 billion loss. But the point is you bought the Bitcoin with equity that was triple the current price. So you have to actually keep in mind that when you're swapping equity for Bitcoin, the only thing that really matters is did you do it at a premium to net asset value after adjusting for liabilities, right? And you have to adjust for all the liabilities on the balance sheet. Was it at a premium to net asset value? And it is, I mean there might be a couple of days in the history of the company where we didn't do that but it would just be a few days. And the second issue is if it's equity, if you can sell a hundred billion dollars of equity at $1,000 a share and the equity trades to $100 a share and the Bitcoin trades down 80%, do you really care that you're showing an 80 billion dollar loss? You still actually are better off than if you hadn't sold the equity in the first place. So if you're actually buying Bitcoin on margin credit, like if you're buying it with a loan that comes due next week, it matters what price you paid for it. If I borrowed a billion dollars from an exchange and I bought the billion dollars and it traded down 50%, that's a problem. If you're buying it for long-dated duration debt, it's much less of an issue. When you're buying it for a hybrid instrument like a preferred stock, the issue with the preferred is all the options switch. So the stochastic cost of capital is lower than the nominal cost of capital because of all the options that accrue to the issuer. For example, with STRC we have the option to lower the dividend when SOFR falls. We have the option to lower the credit spread when we want. We have the options to delay the dividends if we need to. Those options are obscenely valuable to the issuer. And a simple way to look at it is if you're paying 11.5% right now, probably the real cost of capital is 8.5% over 20 years. And because the principle never comes due, you can't ever have a liquidation event. It's a continuous cost. So let me boil this down to a simple observation. If you think that Bitcoin is going to appreciate more than 8.5% a year, then all of our Bitcoin gains are net income. If you don't think Bitcoin's going to appreciate, if you think it's going to appreciate 0% a year, we have like 30-35 years before we run out of money. But our assumption is if you think Bitcoin is going to appreciate 3.2% a year, we pay the dividends forever without selling a share of stock. Okay? And how long do we have for Bitcoin to trade 3%? What's the duration? 30 years. So over 30 years, the equity bet and the credit bets are this. The credit bet is over 30 years, Bitcoin will appreciate 3% or more. And if it doesn't, the credit quality deteriorates. That's the credit bet. And the company can pay the dividends literally forever at 3%. The equity bet is that Bitcoin is going to outperform the cost of capital of the company, which again, most people can't calculate it. They don't really understand it, but probably it's like 8 or 9%. But let's just make it easy, 10%. If Bitcoin appreciates 10% a year, then the equity outperforms Bitcoin because the leverage is all accretive. If Bitcoin goes up 4% a year, then the equity is mildly underperforming Bitcoin over time probably, although we have the float and a lot of optionality there that we can use. But between 3% and 10% the equity may underperform Bitcoin, right? If Bitcoin falls 10% a year, then the credit will become distressed debt. So if you're a credit investor, don't buy the credit if you think Bitcoin's falling 10%. That's obvious. If you're an equity investor, don't buy the equity if you don't think Bitcoin's going to go up more than 10%. And everything in the middle is just managed by the company. But I think a lot of times people will do things like they'll say, 'Well, you have to sell at this price to get a positive yield.' A positive Bitcoin yield. But the truth is the hurdle rate for accretion on a US dollar basis is lower. And so you have the challenge with Bitcoin treasury companies is you have to be simultaneously calculating on a US dollar standard and a BTC standard at all times. And you have to also evaluate liabilities and assets. A lot of times people think preferred equity is a liability. It's only a liability in liquidation. It's impossible to ever get to liquidation. The only way to get to a liquidation event is for the debt to come due. And so if there's no debt like your company or if I have de minimis debt, you're never in a liquidation. But since you're never in a liquidation, the preferred equity isn't a liability. It's an asset and it's equity. So the thing that breaks people's brains is if you assume that you're in a liquidation, then you can think that digital credit is a liability and then you can be all gloom and doom. But since it's impossible to get to a liquidation based on purely digital credit, the only way to get to a liquidation event is you have to have debt that comes due. So it turns out when you're running one of these companies, you have massive optionality and you have control over when you finance things. So most of these narratives start with, 'Well, let's assume that Bitcoin falls 80% and never recovers and then you're in liquidation, then you've got a problem.' And the truth is with every single business on Earth, if you start with a 'let's assume that all of your assets deteriorate 80% and you're in liquidation and they never recover,' there is no business on earth that doesn't look dire if you just make that assumption. But if you start to think a bit more thoughtfully about it, you realize, well, how do I actually ever get to that point? And what does the world look like? And the truth is the businesses are pretty anti-fragile and as the equities fall, the amplification increases and they just get more compelling. So just like digital credit tends to be self-healing and snaps back to par. If Bitcoin crashes, the demand for digital credit falls, which means the creditworthiness and the forward look, the credit profile looks better in the future. And the same is true with the equity. So we're attracting demand for the credit and demand for the equity as the assets trade down. And that's what creates the stability for them to trade back up again.
M
Matt31:10
Yeah, maybe just a couple things to add. So I think you laid out the left tail risk and why you should not overly calculate what if Bitcoin falls 80% and never recovers. If that's your scenario, like none of us should be here. I think you also have to look at the risk of missing the right tail risk. And the right side is probably where almost this entire room would agree. What happens if Bitcoin averages a CAGR of 20%, 30% or 40% for the next 10 to 15 years on average? How do I maximize total returns? And this kind of gets into the concepts of you can't even, it's really hard to look at an operating cash flow business and say you would rather pay for that than stack Bitcoin today. If your assumptions are those CAGRs, you would want to have amplified Bitcoin exposure. It is very likely to be the total return maximizing position. And so I don't think it's really more complicated than that. And then in the downside scenario, we're in a bear market. Bitcoin is right at its 200-week moving average and our companies have basically no stress. We're in the markets raising capital easy. We're buying Bitcoin on a net basis every month. And I think that will continue into the future and it doesn't even feel stressed right now. And I think the assumptions would be in those bear scenarios, capital markets are shut, you're not selling equity. What happens if you had to use your cash reserves for us, our STRC reserves, Bitcoin reserves? How long could you survive? And the reality is these companies are extremely anti-fragile. And I think that if you were to ask people that were skeptical, they would be surprised to see our companies buying Bitcoin right now. But I think the fact that we are buying Bitcoin, that we are raising cash, kind of proves the thesis of what you should expect into a bull market. And remember that it's not about the returns of any week or month or quarter. If you're amplifying Bitcoin exposure, Bitcoin is a long duration asset, right? It has historically had four-year cycles. When you amplify that exposure, you're actually increasing the duration profile even a little bit longer. So I think the companies have held up really well. Seems like we might be at time for some Q&A.
M
Michael Saylor33:27
Yeah. So, shall we take questions from the audience? I think we covered a lot of stuff. Thank you very much. I'll hand the mic to the questioners.
A
Audience Member33:45
Hi Michael. Good afternoon. So when we look at MicroStrategy, the DCA technique has been used quite aggressively across the time. You tend to buy more in a bull market. But with the amount of money you have, isn't that not the best strategy? Because if the four-year cycles happen as you mentioned multiple times, shouldn't you be buying more towards the downside rather than the upside because you will show negative returns again and again and then the hyperbolic growth won't come. And the second one, very controversial question. Do you think Satoshi's wallet is the biggest wallet that holds Bitcoin? Just a random question.
M
Michael Saylor34:21
On the second one, Satoshi seems to have a number of wallets and there's a bit more than a million bitcoins. So I suppose Satoshi is the largest holder. On the first question, we actually have a bunch of ATMs. We have ATMs on the perpetual instruments like STRD, STRF, STRK. We have an ATM on the common equity MSTR and we have an ATM on the credit instrument STRC. And so they're all dynamically adjusted and programmatically run based upon a set of parameters. And it's a function of the equity capital markets, the credit markets, the Bitcoin market, our decision about what to buy or what to sell or what to swap. It's not just adjusted weekly or daily, but it's literally adjusted minute by minute. So what you'll see is we think and we have other options like for example we could go out and sell bonds. You'll notice we have six bonds outstanding. We haven't sold any more bonds. We'll retire all the bonds. So that's just turned off the debt. The debt part of our business we don't see as being strategic or advantageous. You'll notice in our 8K filings we haven't sold any STRD, STRF or STRK. That's because we think they're undervalued. The cost of capital would be too high and we'd be locking in that dividend too long perpetually. So what I would say to you is if you like Bitcoin and you like the company, you should buy those things because I'm not selling those things, right? I wouldn't sell them because I think they're too expensive as a form of capital and they're undervalued. And so we do actively manage that. If STRF were to trade to $200 a share and the cost of capital is 5% for perpetual money, maybe we might start selling it again. So we consider that based upon SOFR and the forward yield curve and the credit markets and the like with STRC. We won't sell at a penny below par and we will sell a lot of it at a penny above par and that's because one of the primary functions of that is to strip all the volatility and that's how we do it and to support the instrument. We allocate our capital to buying Bitcoin or buying dollars depending upon the credit markets and where we are and we're swapping back between buying debt, buying dollars, buying Bitcoin. We've sold some Bitcoin. We sell credit, we sell dollars to buy the bonds. So there's a lot of things we're doing. They're all just dynamically adjusted, and it's just a function of the forward curves and the premiums in the derivatives market, the capital market, the equity market, and all the credit markets. And they're all different and we evaluate them all the time generally with the theme that we want to do things that are equity positive, things that are accretive to the equity. We want to do things that are credit positive, things that are supportive of the credit, especially STRC. We've done a dozen things to support STRC. And then we want to do things that are Bitcoin positive. And sometimes the interests of those three groups are a little bit across purposes and we have to balance those interests one versus the other. And that's pretty much our business, really thinking thoughtfully all the time about those things.
M
Matt38:12
Maybe just one observation on strategy from my old seat of someone that was an institutional investor. Two things stand out to me. One, since you've announced your Bitcoin strategy in 2020, you've outperformed Bitcoin drastically. So that's one sign that it's working. The second is you still trade with a beta to Bitcoin. So if you are underwriting a bull thesis to Bitcoin on Bitcoin updates, it seems to be that the market is still pricing in that that strategy would work and I think that strategy is likely to be one that will continually buy the tops forever and likely buy more as Bitcoin's moving up. But I think that is a feature, not a bug to that type of exposure.
M
Michael Saylor38:56
Yeah. A point I'll make on that, we'll take the next question. If you think Bitcoin is going to appreciate at about 10% or about our cost of capital, then when we report a Bitcoin gain that is comparable to net income. We have a $5 billion Bitcoin gain this year so far, we're on track to maybe get to 10, but we had just slightly south of 10 last year. But if we report a $5 billion Bitcoin gain for you to believe that that is valuable, you have to assume Bitcoin is not falling to zero tomorrow. If you think that Bitcoin is falling 10% a year, then Bitcoin gain isn't that interesting because you're discounting at 10%. But if you think that Bitcoin's going up 0% a year, then we might have incurred a liability. We sold STRK to buy the Bitcoin. I get it. If you think that Bitcoin's going up 10% a year, I sold a billion dollars of STRK to buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin. I'm never paying the money back. The Bitcoin I bought with it is paying the dividend cost because it's going up 10% a year and it's compounding. So the truth is if Bitcoin could probably go up like 8% a year and we could probably have a cost of capital of 10%, all of the gain is net income. If you think Bitcoin is going up 30% a year when we report a five billion dollar Bitcoin gain, that's like 15 billion. It's five billion up front and it's probably another 10 billion on the back end. So the business has obscene profitability, but the reason it's so controversial is your view of the equity is going to have to be modulated through your view of the forward Bitcoin price just like your view of the credit has to be modulated through your view of the forward Bitcoin performance and the Bitcoin V. And you can come to an opinion that the credit is distressed and the equity is awful if you have a negative Bitcoin position or opinion. And you can come to an opinion that we're going to dramatically outperform Bitcoin and generate 50% a year, which is sort of what we've done for the past five years, and that the credit is all investment grade if you have a positive view toward Bitcoin. And since most of the people that are in the market have very divergent views or don't even articulate what their view is before they express an opinion, that's why you get so much controversy and back and forth on that matter. Next question.
A
Audience Member41:31
What's going on Michael? How are you?
M
Michael Saylor41:32
Hey Jack.
J
Jack41:35
So I was the guy referencing the last panel. I have a, obviously love you, questions about dilution and calculating MNAV. So first on the MNAV piece, there's so many different definitions now because the space that you created has grown so much. What is the definition of MNAV? I would assume that if you have an out-of-the-money security like for example 21 raised to convert and it doesn't convert till $13. The stock's at like five. And so if someone were to buy our company, no one would assume that as equity. It would be classified as debt. And so I see some people treating out of the money securities as equity, which obviously would potentially inflate the equity, which makes the MNAV calculation more beneficial to the company. And so because that also implies like what is dilutive? The question on dilution is if swapping equity for dollars is not dilutive like if I start a company I raise 100 grand for 10% of the business I would assume that's dilutive because now I own 90% of the business, some investor owns 10%, I own less equity, that was a dilutive transaction. But if raising dollars for equity isn't dilutive and that transaction you would classify as not dilution, then what would be dilutive? So one, how do you measure MNAV which implies what's dilutive and accretive? And then if swapping equity for anything isn't dilution, what would be dilutive?
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Michael Saylor43:07
Yeah. So first of all, the way we define it is we're taking the equity market cap and then we're adding in the debt, the net debt, and we're adding in the notional preferred equity to create an MNAV, which we put on our website. But a lawyer will tell you that a public company cannot have a publicly traded security based strictly on a single website disclosure. If you look at what we publish, we publish 8Ks and we publish 10-Qs and 10-Ks. And if you read them, what you'll see is a raft of language that says, 'By the way, this is not a measure of liquidity and this doesn't show the full financial picture and you have to take into account all of the liabilities, all of the assets of the company to form an opinion.' So the reason I don't think there's anything wrong with our MNAV calculation, but the MNAV calculation isn't the only calculation. You can also calculate MNAB by adjusting, you can calculate net assets. Take the assets of the company, subtract the debt and then you could subtract the preferred stock if you wanted and you would have a net asset value per share. So you can have gross assets per share and net assets per share. And you can see these things don't matter if the company is substantially equity financed or the debt is like a small amount, a stub. They start to matter when the company has got 30, 40, 50% preferred stock and at that point you would have a different number. So assets per share could be 100x a share and net assets could be 80 or 90 per share. If you're actually calculating the price you have to sell the stock at in order to generate a BTC yield, it's a higher price than the price you have to sell the stock at in order to generate a US dollar yield because if you, for example, if the company's worth a billion dollars and you sell a hundred million of stock, is it dilutive? If you trade $100 million of stock for $10 million in cash, it's dilutive. So what are the classic dilutive deals? I bought someone's billion dollar business for a billion of stock and then I wrote it down a year later because I realized it's only worth 50 million bucks and I actually got 50 million of value for a billion dollars of stock. It was a $950 million dilution. So dilutive deals happen often when you're buying an intangible asset like a company with its goodwill and you overvalue the thing you bought. If I bought a Picasso for a hundred million and it was only worth 25 million, that might be a dilution. When you trade a hundred million of stock for a hundred million of cash, there's not a lot of room to write the cash down, right? It's a hundred million of cash. So the likelihood that you get surprised by a write down of goodwill and it becomes a dilutive deal is next to nothing. So it turns out that a billion dollar company that issues a hundred million of equity has not diluted the shareholders. It's simply expanded the capital structure from 1 billion to 1.1 billion. You still have the same assets per share, right? You have 10% more shares. You have 10% more. If you had a billion dollars and a billion dollar market cap and you sold a hundred million of shares and you get a hundred million of cash, what you're doing in those trades is you're expanding the capital structure which is credit positive, right? You're creating more credit worth. The company's more creditworthy. You've got more cash and you're probably increasing the liquidity of the equity. It's not dilutive at all. It's just growing the company. Where the calculations get complicated is when you have various types of liabilities. And by the way, let's say I have $10 billion of debt that comes due in a year. That's not the same as $10 billion of credit that you have a variable dividend rate on that comes due never. You can treat them the same, but one of them is a liability of sorts, a liability in liquidation, but actually an asset in operation. That's why it's a hybrid. That's why it's complicated. And that being the case, you'll find that there's a lot of times when it makes sense to expand the capital structure of the company and add cash or add Bitcoin, which decreases credit risk, which increases equity liquidity, which expands but is not dilutive. Now what I would say is the reason the lawyers would say you cannot mention these things, you won't see a quarterly filing where we just said the Bitcoin yield was this. The quarterly filing comes with 95 pages of documents and in there you have the complete balance sheet, all the cash, the net debt, all the obligations. And one of the things when you're a public officer like the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, the statement I sign every quarter for like 30 years almost is you're saying there are no off-balance sheet liabilities undisclosed. So for you to understand whether the company's accreting or diluting, you have to understand all of the tangible assets, the cash, all of the liabilities. But now, is it really appropriate to subtract a billion dollars of preferred equity as a liability? Not if you're a bank. It's literally mezzanine capital. It's equity. And so it is a dividend liability, cumulative or non-cumulative, but it is not a balance sheet liability. And so now you're asking the question, well, what is accretive? It turns out that generally if the company is selling equity above the net asset value on a per share basis and swapping it for tangible assets whether it's Bitcoin or cash, it will be accretive. If you calculate the net asset value per share, Bitcoin plus cash minus all the liabilities, and you have an opinion about whether that is a liability and you sell the equity below that number, then that will be dilutive. And so there are equity swaps that are dilutive. They have to take into account a model of liabilities, assets, and the full balance sheet per share at the time you did the swap. And that's why you're right. This MNAV, you can come up with another MNAV that might be better. What I would say is, when we invented BTC yield, we hadn't invented digital credit yet. So the business model has changed in the last 12 months. In fact, digital credit's only 10 months old and we didn't know it was going to work until 3 months ago or 4 months ago. So the business model is evolving. The metrics are evolving. By the way, I'm going to give you a prop. Until you guys came public, we weren't able to publish Bitcoin per share on our website. And if you go to our website, we finally have Bitcoin per share. The lawyers thought that was just too scary a thing to put out. So we have added metrics, Bitcoin per share. We've added new metrics for credit metrics that are evolving. I don't think we're done. I don't think that BTC yield can be understood, but only if you make an assumption about BTC ARR for the next 30 years. And if you don't, right? And so BTC yield isn't wrong if you're forecasting 10 years from now at 20% ARR. But if you said to me, Mike, what is the accretion of the deal this minute or on Monday morning when you publish the 8K, then you would actually go and you would calculate net asset. You would calculate Satoshi's per share on a net basis attributable to the common stock shareholders after subtracting the liabilities. But with the caveat that it's simple to subtract the debt liability because it's a hard dollar amount with a date certain. There's still a lot of room for debate about what is the right way to value a hybrid credit instrument like STRC. The trolls will say it's not credit. Well, it's certainly credit. Go to your AI and ask whether or not preferred stocks that pay a dividend are credit. It will say it's credit. Preferred stocks are credit. Dividend bearing instruments are credit. It's credit. It's not debt. But debt, I will tell you, Jack, our debt has options to the benefit of the creditor. For example, the people that bought the convertible bond have the right to put it back to us if it's trading below par on a put date. That's an option that accrues to them. The STRC credit, the preferred credit, they have options that accrue to the issuer. It's the exact opposite. Whereas the creditor has an option which is a liability to the company, the credit issuer in a pref has an option that's an asset to the company. And so that being the case, I don't think that there's one simple metric. What I would say to you is I think that the set of digital metrics for a digital treasury company are evolving in a market. They change what we do. You changed what we do. We're all impacting each other and we're learning from each other. It's a moving target. The business models aren't even 12 months old. And then if you were to say, well, I can say I think I generated $5 billion in Bitcoin gain if you assume Bitcoin is going to appreciate 10% a year. If you're an equity investor, the assumption you have to make is does Bitcoin appreciate 10% a year for a decade? Is the business model of selling digital credit stable for a decade? Is the volatility of Bitcoin stable for a decade? If yes to those three things, I'll give you a P/E of 10. But if I'm not sure, I might give you a P/E of two. And so there is a massive room for people to value these equity instruments and credit instruments based upon sophisticated models. I think the company's obligation is we publish everything under the sun. The critics don't listen to the earnings call. They don't read the document. It's like, well, if you don't have attention span to read a page, you're probably not going to read 100 pages. But my advice to everybody is if you don't have a long attention span, put the document into the AI and ask the AI to read it for you and analyze it and break it down and then it will give you at least an informed opinion as opposed to someone that just wants to tweet something on Twitter and get some clicks.
M
Matt55:28
Maybe a quick, I know you have a quick follow-up question, but when I was at CalPERS, one of my first jobs was making risk and analytics reports for four different portfolio managers. They all asked for very different calculations and views into the same similar fixed income portfolios. And so I think the answer is that there's no single metric that will tell a full story and we shouldn't expect it. I think if you're succeeding, if we're succeeding, what we do is we provide what we think is the best view, but then also provide all the data to allow people to easily create their own views that show their own way that they want to look at the risk and return. And ultimately, we'll be judged on do we outperform Bitcoin over time, not is a single transaction accretive or dilutive because I think those will always be debatable or almost always.
J
Jack56:20
Yeah. I agree Twitter's a terrible place. It's been awful for my mental health. So I agree with that and I hope everyone succeeds to be clear. I've been long Bitcoin since I was 18 and everyone that wants Bitcoin to work, I'm a fan of genuinely. Just my quick follow-ups are more, I just want to understand. So let's say Google who I think was inspired by you Michael and raised I think they raised tens of billions.
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Michael Saylor56:48
15 billion dollar pref.
J
Jack56:49
Yeah. And they also raise money through the ATM. They use the ATM.
M
Michael Saylor56:53
For the record, we were the biggest equity issuer in the world last year, but we won't be this year. Everybody's doing ATMs. They're all doing prefs. There's a lot of stuff going on.
J
Jack57:04
Totally. So that was cool. The preface aside, the ATM they issuing common, in how Google talked about it, they told investors and shareholders interpreted it, they talked about it as a dilutive transaction because they were creating more common shares for cash. Do you think that that definition shouldn't apply to MicroStrategy or Bitcoin treasury companies?
M
Michael Saylor57:29
Let me make a point there. If you sell a billion dollars of equity to invest in semiconductors in Nvidia chips that have a useful life of four years, then yeah, it's probably going to be dilutive unless you can prove that the business you're investing in is going to generate cash flows that offset that dilution. So you got to keep in mind most people that issue, when you are a $4 trillion company and you sell a trillion dollars of equity to buy a trillion dollars of cash, it's not dilutive. All you've done is expand the capital structure. And it's not dilutive at the time you did it. The argument has to be I'm investing the cash in a money market that yields 3% or 2% after tax and the existing business was generating return on capital of 12%. That's the way in which it becomes diluted. So whenever you sell equity or swap equity for another asset, if the other asset has a higher return on capital than your existing business, it'll be accretive. If it's equal to your existing business, it'll be neutral. You just have a bigger capital structure. And if you buy a business that underperforms the existing business, you've got a monopoly that's got 80% margins and is growing 40% a year and you buy something with 10% margins growing 5% a year at the same multiple, at the same P/E of your business. If you're valued with a P/E of 40 and then you buy something that's a low growth business, not profitable at a P/E of 40, that's a dilutive equity transaction. But the definition of whether it's accretive or dilutive comes down to the use of proceeds. For example, if I'm buying Bitcoin by swapping stock, if I'm doing it above the net asset value, it's always going to be accretive. If I'm buying cash that underperforms Bitcoin instead of buying Bitcoin, then the question is why did I do it? Well, if I did it to make the credit more creditworthy and sell 20 billion worth of STRC next year, you're saying I'm actually investing in the credit business by buying the cash. That's what makes that accretive. And I'm not saying you can't do a dilutive capital raise. You can. I'm just saying you have to consider the use of proceeds. And most, let's take Oracle. Oracle did a hundred acquisitions. Were they accretive or dilutive? On every acquisition, they're buying another software company and their CFO creates a 10-year cash flow model. And they go to the investors and say, 'We think this is accretive because we're going to take all these costs out.' The revenue will be this and our business has got a 40% operating margin and we traded at a price to revenue of eight. We bought this business at a price to revenue of two and it's got a 20% margin. We're getting it to 40%. And so the investors look at that and say yeah those are all accretive transactions but you have to justify each one of them. And what I would say is the successful companies are doing accretive transactions. Wall Street's littered with a history of companies that failed that did dilutive transactions. If you buy a bunch of hardware that depreciates in four years and the bottom falls out of the business and you traded equity in a good business that was a monopoly growing, that'll be dilutive. And if on the other hand you buy a monopoly which is growing at the same rate or it's better than your existing business with the equity, it'll be accretive.
J
Jack1:01:16
Don't let them kick us off. And on the MNAV, my last one then I'm out of here. So just for the benefit of the audience, I'll use my own company 21 raised a convertible bond. Our stock was at 10 and it was what we call up 30. So it would convert at 30% at a premium. So it would convert at a stock price of 13. Right now, our stock, I'm just using round numbers. These are not super precise, but for the point, our stock's at five. And so when I say out of money security, if someone wanted to buy 21 right now and a bank or someone was trying to come up with a valuation, they wouldn't assume that that would convert into equity because it would convert at 13, it's what we call an out-of-the-money security. Does that make sense? Because the stock's at five.
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Michael Saylor1:02:02
Your leverage has gone through the roof. And so if there's a bull market then the equity, like our equity to $12 a share Jack in 2022 and then it roared back.
J
Jack1:02:13
Totally. Yeah. So this is just a semantics MNAV question. You can interpret and measure MNAV and as the industry you coming up with these new instruments which I agree with you, the preferred perpetual preferred, it's not debt, it never converts to equity, like what is it? I agree with that. What should a shareholder of any of these companies, your company, your company, like what should a shareholder view as the MNAV for them to look at? Is it just the one on the company website or?
M
Michael Saylor1:02:45
I think any equity investor has to have a clear opinion of the forward volatility curve of Bitcoin, the forward price curve of Bitcoin. If you form an opinion on those two things, then you can create a model of the company and you have to understand the company's assets and its liabilities and the duration, the cost of the capital and the duration of the capital. Is it debt coming due in one year or debt coming due in six years? You have to build that model. Then you plug in your assumptions and it'll spit out what is the fair value of the equity and it'll spit out the credit risk if there's any credit.
J
Jack1:03:31
So just like eye of the beholder. It depends on the investor is what the MNAV is.
M
Michael Saylor1:03:36
Every investor I know does that Jack. If you've got a billion dollars of stock, our major investors, they have their own models just like all the equity analysts create models and they plug in that assumption and then they make decisions about whether the credit is cheap or rich and whether the equity is cheap or rich. And by the way, the best investors, they'll buy, they're like, 'I like your stock at an MNAB of one spot two, and when it gets an MNAB of three, I sold a little bit.' And they trade it.
J
Jack1:04:11
Yeah.
M
Michael Saylor1:04:11
Like all just like the derivative traders. If you look at our stock, it's trading in line with Bitcoin every minute. Trust me, that's not me. I can't make my stock trade minute by minute in line with Bitcoin. That's because traders at Susquehanna or Citadel or Soros, they have models and they're Bloombergs just like all the convertible bond guys have models and they're literally buying and selling and trading based on fair value. If you go to our website, you can plug in the forward Bitcoin V and ARR curve and spit out the credit spread that's fair for all the credit. And so once you've got an opinion, you'll have an idea of fair value and then you can make your investment decision. You cannot make it on one number without actually having a sophisticated view and you need a full capital model and you need a view of the future if you're going to be a trader. If you don't want to do that, my advice is just buy the credit or hold it forever or just buy the Bitcoin and hold it forever.
J
Jack1:05:21
Yeah, we were on the panel before and it's an interesting conversation if you're talking about two different MNABs, right? Like if everyone's calculating their own metric, then the guy next to me is saying it's this, this guy's saying it's that, and we're all talking about.
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Michael Saylor1:05:34
I don't think the markets form consensus about what, it's not even clear that MNAB's the only metric. There's a lot of other metrics and the whole point, if you read our disclosures, the lawyers literally have one page and in the one page they point out that every single metric has its limitations and you have to take the entirety of all of the financial reports and all of the SEC filings of the company in order to form a responsible, comprehensive opinion. And they're not wrong. I can put one line, one clause in one security instrument that you sell and negate any metric in the world. And so you have to, that's why we file the filings. That's why we encourage people to read them and that's why we try to overcommunicate. And that's why I don't think there's a single metric even though there are some that are useful. I would say as you put STRK into your business, looking at your MNAV versus our MNAV should be apples and oranges in a major major way and it's why you have to go a layer deeper. And I think for us, our reported MNAV on our website is consistent with what the average institutional investor looks at. But even talking to the institutional investors, there's not a consensus opinion, which kind of gets me back to what is the best thing. Provide all the data you possibly can and open source it and let people build and then as they build we learn and we continue to try to give the best perspective.
M
Matt1:07:12
These business models are embryonic in their first year and they're all different. In the retail business, they have the same business filings for like 80 years. A lot of businesses like the airline business, the retail business, the hotel industry, they're stable for 50 years. They've stabilized. But you can't expect that in our business since literally this stuff is all 12 months old. It's a bit more dynamic.
J
Jack1:07:40
Thank you very much. We went massively over time, but I hope it was worth it. Thank you very much.