Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor earns $700 million in 3-day crypto gain

When of MicroStrategy Michael Saylor came on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” in December to talk about crypto, he said, “the only thing we can count on is Bitcoin going forward in 2024, and the strategy built around Bitcoin , is generally quite safe for institutions’.

While the long-term safety of Bitcoin may still be up for debate, Saylor’s strategy has been extremely profitable, especially this week.

Shares of MicroStrategy, which derives most of its value from its bitcoin holdings, jumped 10% on Wednesday, bringing its three-day rally to 40%. Saylor is MicroStrategy’s largest investor with a 12% stake in the company. He also disclosed in 2020 the personal ownership of 17,732 bitcoins.

Add it up, and Saylor is about $700 million richer than he was on Sunday.

Between Saylor’s control of MicroStrategy and his bitcoin, his holdings rose to $2.96 billion in value on Wednesday from $2.27 billion earlier in the week.

A MicroStrategy spokesman said the company does not comment on Saylor’s personal finances.

The big catalyst this week was bitcoin’s rally to its highest level since November 2021. The digital currency rose to around $64,000 on Wednesday from $51,500 early Monday. It bounced back to around $60,000 later in the day on Coinbase the app suffered issues that caused many users to see zero balances in their accounts.

Saylor, who founded MicroStrategy in 1989 and remains the company’s chairman, is one of bitcoin’s main evangelists, co-authoring a book about the cryptocurrency in 2023 titled What Is Money?

MicroStategy has a business in enterprise software and cloud-based services, but its ownership of Bitcoin effectively makes the company a proxy for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

The company said Monday that it acquired an additional 3,000 bitcoins for a total of $155 million between February 15 and February 25. MicroStrategy, along with its subsidiaries, now owns about 193,000 bitcoins, worth nearly $12 billion.

MicroStrategy announced its plan to invest in bitcoin in mid-2020, disclosing in an earnings call that it will commit $250 million over the next 12 months to “one or more alternative assets,” which could include digital currencies like bitcoin. At the time, the company’s market capitalization was around $1.1 billion. He is now worth more than $16 billion.

During MicroStrategy’s latest earnings call on February 7, Chief Financial Officer Andrew Kang said the company is “the world’s largest corporate holder of bitcoin, and we remain committed to our bitcoin acquisition strategy with the utmost conviction.” .

Shares of MicroStrategy are now up 52% ​​for the year after jumping 346% in 2023.

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