New Bitcoin Whales Emerge in the Corporate World

While Tesla is the most familiar name across the world’s largest corporate buyers, several companies have amassed far more bitcoin – leading their share prices to skyrocket in value last year. At the same time, the vast majority are found in North America, with the exception of Nexon, a Japanese-based video game publisher.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu, shows the public companies that own the most bitcoin, based on data from CoinGecko.

MicroStrategy at the Top

As the world’s largest corporate owner of bitcoin, MicroStrategy holds 174,530 bitcoin valued at an estimated $9.1 billion as of February 22, 2024.

Headquartered in Virginia, the intelligence software firm first began buying bitcoin in 2020 and has since grown its holdings to become roughly 10 times bigger than the next highest corporate owner. MicroStrategy shares soared over 350% in 2023 thanks to its scale of bitcoin holdings.

Here’s who holds the most bitcoins globally across public companies as of February 22, 2024:

Tesla is the fourth-largest owner on the list, with bitcoin holdings worth $546.7 million.

In 2021, the company announced that it bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin to help boost the company’s bottom line. It also served as a way to provide liquidity to customers who could buy its products with the cryptocurrency. Yet the following year, the company sold a large share of its holdings at a steep loss during the crypto crash.

Two Canadian companies, Hut 8 and Hive Blockchain, are top holders of bitcoin. These cryptocurrency mining companies have seen their shares surge over 191% and 144%, respectively.

With even stronger returns, bitcoin miner CleanSpark saw its shares boom over 425% in 2023. This year, the company announced plans to purchase four new facilities for mining bitcoin. Three of these are located in Mississippi, purchased for a total of $19.8 million.

As bitcoin climbs to fresh record highs, corporate interest in bitcoin may continue to increase in tandem with a wider scope of buyers. Newly regulated spot bitcoin ETFs have also fueled demand, leading bitcoin’s market cap to hit $1 trillion for the first time since 2021.