Tesla, Square BTC Buys Were 'Tip of the Iceberg': Saylor
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MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor called his company’s BTC purchases, along with those of Tesla and Square, the “tip of the iceberg” for institutional investment in the cryptocurrency.
Speaking to TIME, Saylor said that “there’s been an avalanche of institutional involvement” in BTC, including MicroStrategy’s own purchases as well as those of Tesla and payments company Square. Tesla’s $1.5 billion BTC buy, he argued, was an “inflection point” for institutional investment in the cryptocurrency.
“All of a sudden, the narrative goes from “Those crazy people, what are they thinking, speculating in BTC?” to “Maybe this is a real thing. This is probably not going away,” Saylor told TIME.
Saylor offered to share his “playbook” for buying BTC with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in December 2020, after Musk tweeted about the cryptocurrency.
When Tesla revealed in February 2021 that it had added BTC to its balance sheet, and would accept the cryptocurrency as payment for its products, Saylor was among the first to congratulate Musk on the company’s BTC investment.
Congratulations & thank you to @elonmusk & @Tesla on adding #BTC to their balance sheet. The entire world will benefit from this leadership.https://t.co/FVTepBqAI2
— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) February 8, 2021
Cloud service provider MicroStrategy rocked Wall Street when it became the first publicly traded firm in the US to start investing in BTC last year. The company bought $1 billion in BTC last month followed by several other smaller purchases and now possesses 91,326 BTC, having paid a total of $2.211 billion for the entire stash.
It’s also hosted a “BTC for Corporations” summit advising other corporations on how to invest in the cryptocurrency. Speaking to TIME, Saylor noted that he’d expected only a “couple of thousand” people to attend. “It ended up being more than 10,000 a day, and it broke our video server,” he said.
Rational investment behavior
MicroStrategy’s venture into BTC has also had a positive impact on the company’s stock, which has soared more than sevenfold in the last 12 months and is now valued at $777–up from $107 a year ago.
Saylor argued that the surge of investors flocking to BTC was a “textbook example” of rational action in response to monetary inflation, noting that the global money supply has expanded “in an unprecedented fashion” over the last year. BTC, he said, is a store of value.
“BTC is not speculation, O.K.?” he said. “BTC is a unique new technology, it’s like the Facebook of money or the Google of money. And it grew from nothing to a trillion dollars in monetary value in 12 years.”
Last month, Saylor joined Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the founders of cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, to back the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and its new research and development program to strengthen BTC’s infrastructure with $4 million in funding.
