In brief
- MicroStrategy, the business intelligence software company helmed by Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, is hosting a series of conferences today and tomorrow.
- Saylor has directed the company to invest heavily in Bitcoin.
- In a keynote this morning, Saylor said he expects other companies to follow suit.
Software company MicroStrategy has become one of the most visible institutional Bitcoin investors in the world over the past year, thanks in large part to its CEO, Michael Saylor, whose breathless tweets about the inevitability of Bitcoin have become something like a company gospel.
MicroStrategy already owns 71,079 BTC (that’s $2.6 billion), and there’s no sign it will stop investing anytime soon.
And in a session today at MicroStrategy’s multi-day “WorldNow” conference, Saylor said he expects other companies to join him in the crusade.
“If your company has money on its balance sheet, and it’s sitting in fiat currencies like euros and dollars, they’re losing about 15% of their purchasing power each year,” said Saylor, appearing to inaccurately imply that all fiat currencies are devaluing at a flat rate of 15% a year. (According to the Consumer Price Index, Americans paid just 1.4% more for goods and services in 2020 than they did in 2019, and the value of the dollar weakened only slightly last year.)
“The simple solution is convert some of that cash into Bitcoin. We did it, Square did it. You’re going to see an avalanche of companies in the coming 12 months also converting their balance sheets into Bitcoin because it’s a scarce digital safe haven asset.”
That Saylor is once again making the argument for Bitcoin adoption comes as no surprise, given the size of his investment.
He’s admitted that pushing Bitcoin is the explicit goal of the conference: in a conversation with Ross Stevens—founder of the asset manager Stone Ridge, and another Bitcoin believer—Saylor said that while they may already be on board, “the reason we’re having this conference is to help everybody else figure out what they should do.”
Stevens suggested that the decision to convert company reserves to Bitcoin, from fiat currency, may be the most important decision an executive can make over the next decade.
Whether that’s true for other companies’ bottom lines, it certainly matters for MicroStrategy and its growing Bitcoin reserve.