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- MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor laid out his company’s bitcoin strategy in a CNBC interview.
- He explained why betting heavily on “digital gold” should be good for the company’s investors.
- Bitcoin is a better inflation hedge than gold, and there’s a place for ethereum in crypto, he said.
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MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor walked through his company’s bitcoin investing strategy, fresh from borrowing $500 million to fund its purchases and filing to sell up to $1 billion in shares, in a CNBC Fast Money interview on Tuesday evening.
The noted bitcoin evangelist explained why investors will still buy MicroStrategy shares when they could instead buy bitcoin, why he thinks bitcoin is a better inflation hedge than gold, and how ethereum has a role to play in the crypto world.
Here are 10 of his best quotes, lightly edited for clarity.
- “Investors are seeing that bitcoin’s up 330%, and gold is up 7% in that period, so bitcoin is outperforming gold as an inflation hedge by a factor of 50.” – Comparing performance over the last 12 months as markets focus on the potential for rising inflation.
- “It’s digital gold on a big tech network.” – his view of bitcoin.
- “Bitcoin is the highest, most dominant, digital property network. Think of it as granite blocks in cyber-Manhattan. Then you’ve got digital currency – that’s like tether and stablecoins – they want to be money markets in cyberspace, and so they’ll be like the CBDC dollars. Then you’ve got digital applications like ethereum. Ethereum wants to dematerialize the JPMorgan building and the banking establishment and all of the exchanges.” – breaking down what he called the “crypto universe”.
- “As the market starts to understand these things, there’s a place for everybody.” – on how the crypto world will shake out.
- “Your ETF won’t be able to buy billions of dollars at low interest rates and leverage up. So to the extent that the investors feel the management team knows how to manage leverage and manage the core business, then we should get a premium against an ETF.” – on why investors should buy MicroStrategy stock when they could buy bitcoin.
- “It’s actually an ideal situation, because our stock was trading about $120 a share with $60 a share in cash. Our investors told us that cash was trash, it was a liability on our balance sheet. If we had given it all back, we would be trading at $60 a share.” – asked whether getting so heavily into bitcoin is what MicroStrategy’s investors want the company to be doing. MicroStrategy is trading at around $616 a share.
- “The core of the business is up 10%, the bitcoin business is driving shareholder returns.” – on how the bitcoin push has not distracted MicroStrategy from its core software business.
- “We put in place this billion dollar at-the-market shelf registration so that we’d have a standing program to be able to go back to the capital markets to issue equity in the future – should the circumstances present themselves – and we would use that either to buy bitcoin, or to retire debt, or for general corporate purposes.” – noting that MicroStrategy won’t necessarily use proceeds from its potential $1 billion share sale to buy bitcoin
- “You’re seeing Paul Tudor Jones and the other early bitcoin believers thinking, ‘Maybe it’s time for me to double or triple my allocation’. Between you and me, I’m surprised they’re not increasing their allocation by a factor of 10, because bitcoin’s 50 times better.” – on investors getting into bitcoin.
- “The world is waking up to the fact that bitcoin is digital property on an open monetary network. That’s pretty profound, because it’s going to spread to billions of people on the planet.”