Michael Saylor is never selling MicroStrategy’s bitcoin

This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:

Even by the standards of bitcoin bulls, Michael Saylor stands out.

The MicroStrategy executive chairman spends his days posting quasi-mystical bitcoin memes and prophet-like pronouncements (see his pinned post on X). His company now holds 205,000 bitcoins (~$14.5 billion right now) and he’s spearheaded MicroStrategy’s transition from a modest business software company to a bitcoin proxy that happens to sell software — and also acts as a bitcoin-funding vehicle.

To that end, MicroStrategy just announced a convertible debt offering to fund its latest bitcoin purchase.

Saylor touts the value of bitcoin as “digital property” versus the more common “digital currency” designation and holds it up as an excellent store of value — the “apex property,” in fact, as he told Yahoo Finance in a video interview yesterday.

Certainly it looks like a much better store of value now, near record highs, than it did during the most recent crypto winter, but Saylor remained steadfast all the way down and back up again.

And it sounds like he has no plans to sell — ever.

“We think bitcoin is the highest form of property, the apex property in the world, and it’s the best investment asset,” he said. “So the endgame is to acquire more bitcoin. Whoever gets the most bitcoin wins. There is no other endgame.”

Put another way, he said, “We believe that the highest, best use of bitcoin is to buy bitcoin and hold the bitcoin.”

To be clear, this is unusual. Most companies that hold other assets on their balance sheets — from real estate to stocks — do it with the aim of getting a return on their investment. Saylor likens bitcoin to a forever investment; he says one analogy is NYC real estate. Another bitcoin bull, Scott Melker, recently told Yahoo Finance he plans to hold bitcoin until he dies so he can pass it to his kids.

Saylor’s philosophy does seem to be paying off. The market is pricing in a 90% premium to MicroStrategy’s stock over the price of bitcoin itself, according to TD Cowen analyst Lance Vitanza, who just slapped a $1,560 price target on the shares in a new note.

That doesn’t mean it’s a logical one for most bitcoin buyers to emulate. Holding an asset to infinity without ever selling may make the company rich on paper, but the rest of us have bills to pay. Unlike bitcoin, NYC real estate will at least give you some rent — or a place to live.