Michael Saylor Congratulates Elon Musk on Tesla's $1.5 Billion Bitcoin Buy

By Stephen Graves

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor has congratulated Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the EV firm's $1.5 billion investment into Bitcoin.

"Congratulations & thank you to @elonmusk & @Tesla on adding #Bitcoin to their balance sheet.  The entire world will benefit from this leadership," he tweeted today.

News of Tesla's Bitcoin buy spread like wildfire, propelling the price of Bitcoin to a new all-time high above $43,000.

MicroStrategy's $2.5 billion Bitcoin buying spree

Saylor has overseen an aggressive program of Bitcoin purchases by MicroStrategy, with the software company buying up some $2.5 billion of the cryptocurrency over the past year.

Earlier this month, Saylor explained that the company had sought new stores of value to invest in, as a result of aggressive monetary expansion caused by the coronavirus pandemic. “The returns on gold didn’t look nearly as compelling as Bitcoin,” said Saylor.

Saylor's "$100 billion favor" to Musk

In December 2020, Saylor tweeted to Musk that, "If you want to do your shareholders a $100 billion favor, convert the $TSLA balance sheet from USD to #BTC."

For his part, Musk wondered whether "such large transactions [are] even possible?" whereupon Saylor offered to "share my playbook with you offline."

The MicroStrategy CEO is intent on luring other companies into the Bitcoin fold; last week, the firm hosted the "World.Now" conference, at which it provided a series of "Bitcoin for Corporations" sessions aimed at interested institutional investors.

In a keynote speech at the event, Saylor said he expected an "avalanche of companies" to follow suit and convert their balance sheets into Bitcoin, as a "scarce digital safe haven asset."

With Saylor advising Musk that "other firms on the S&P 500 would follow your lead," he may have set the first pebble in motion.

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