News from Michael Saylor: he owns a billion dollars in Bitcoin

Yesterday Michael Saylor revealed an interesting news about himself, and about the Bitcoin he owns. 

He was interviewed by Bloomberg within the program Open Interest, and he revealed several things about MicroStrategy and his personal portfolio. 

Michael Saylor news: The possession of Bitcoin

At a certain point, the interviewer, Sonali Basak, asked him how many Bitcoin he personally owned. 

He was not referring to the BTC purchased and held by MicroStrategy, but to those purchased by himself with personal funds, and held in his wallets.

Saylor responded by saying that he has significant personal holdings in Bitcoin, stating that he has more than 17,000 and has never sold them.

He did not reveal the precise quantity, but at the current price it should correspond to more than a billion dollars. 

MicroStrategy instead owns more than 226,000 BTC, with a total market value of almost 13 billion dollars. 

Bitcoin news: The strategy of Michael Saylor

Saylor also spoke about MicroStrategy’s strategy in this sense, and he also quickly mentioned his personal one. 

Regarding his personal strategy, he not only stated that he has never sold Bitcoin, but also that he wants to buy more. 

He stated that he considers Bitcoin a good investment for private citizens, families, institutions, and even for States, as well as for companies.

He added: 

“I can’t see a better place to put my money”.

Note that at first he said he tweeted about four years ago that he owned about 17,700 BTC, and later he added that more or less they are the same BTC he still owns today. 

So the hypothesis is that he bought before 2021, and then from then until today he hasn’t bought Bitcoin anymore. MicroStrategy’s strategy, on the other hand, is different. 

He made the purchases before the last big bullrun started, in October 2020, at an average price of only $9,900. 

So in total he invested about 175 million dollars, which over time have transformed into a potential current capital of about 1.010 billion, with a gain of 477% in less than four years. 

Why don’t you sell?

Saylor did not reveal the reason why he bought Bitcoin four years ago and never sold them, not even during the great bullrun of 2021. 

It is necessary to distinguish between the corporate strategy of MicroStrategy, aimed at building a treasure to be maintained over time, and that of a private citizen. 

For private citizens, it would make sense to sell in profit to be able to spend such profits.

However, it is very likely that Michael Saylor does not need to sell BTC to finance his expenses, given that he has other abundant sources of income. So as long as he has dollars to spend, he spends those, rather than keeping them in his portfolio, while he probably only spends BTC if he has run out of dollars. 

His idea could be to build a sort of supplementary pension with Bitcoin, that is, to buy them with a part of his income while he is earning, and then sell them, or spend them, when he no longer has income. 

Or he keeps them aside for possible emergencies, that is, in case at some point in his life he no longer has dollars to spend. 

Bitcoin as a supplementary pension

The so-called “pensione” on the other hand works exactly in this way, in theory. 

Those who produce income set aside, more or less forcibly, a part of the money earned while working to be able to use it later when they stop working, effectively losing the income. 

Although there are people who continue to have income in money even after they have stopped working, most people can only rely on the pension once they have stopped working. 

Bitcoin in theory should be able to maintain its purchasing power over the very long term better than fiat currencies, so to preserve value over the long term it should be better.

The comparison with the dollar

These are reasonings that should not be made in years, but in decades. 

Compared to a decade ago (2014), the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by more than 26%, while that of Bitcoin has increased by more than 5,000%.

Although it is not to be expected that Bitcoin will replicate such performances in the coming decades, even if it were to reduce these gains by a tenth, reaching +500% per decade, it would still be an exceptional form of long-term value preservation. Even if it reduced it by a hundred times, to +50%, it would still be better than fiat currencies. 

It should not be forgotten that fiat currencies are specifically created to lose about 2% of their purchasing power on average each year. This should lead on average to a 16% loss of purchasing power per decade, although there can be decades of greater losses (like the last one), and decades of lesser losses. 

So it makes no sense to set aside money in fiat currency for retirement, so much so that pension funds always try to counteract the loss of value due to inflation with investments, while it might make sense to set aside Bitcoin.