#SaylorBTCPurchase

This is the story of the man who became the first CEO of a publicly listed company to make a long-term investment in Bitcoin.

Last summer, no one in the crypto industry knew who Michael J. Saylor was. Barely a year later, his words have serious weight — and the power to move Bitcoin’s price.

It all began on Aug. 11, 2020, when the MicroStrategy CEO announced that the Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm was making a long-term investment of $250 million in Bitcoin.

He described Bitcoin as a “dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash.”

More than anything else, those four words — “dependable store of value” — are magic words on Wall Street. A store of value is an asset that will be worth the same or more over time, rather than depreciate — gold being the oldest and most reliable. And with the U.S. Treasury printing trillions of dollars to pay for COVID-related stimulus spending, the dollar is looking mighty inflationary.

Saylor’s move was a first — the head of a mainstream public company calling Satoshi Nakamoto’s cryptocurrency a good long-term investment, and putting his corporate treasury where his mouth was.

On Sept. 15, Saylor doubled down, adding another $175 million to MicroStrategy’s balance sheet. That $425 million bought a total of 38,250 BTC.

The company’s haul has since grown dramatically. The firm held 90,859 BTC as of Mar. 1, which it purchased for about $2.2 billion. When Bitcoin hit a new all-time high of $61,683 later in the month, that investment was worth a jaw-dropping $5.6 billion. MicroStrategy was sitting on paper profits of $3.4 billion — seven months after its audacious gamble.

Aside from Bitcoin, the company’s annual revenue is strong… but it has declined slightly for seven consecutive years, coming in at $481 million for 2020.