Michael Saylor is the world’s foremost Bitcoin buyer. “You do not sell your Bitcoin,” wrote the crypto billionaire in October. But, on a Tuesday earnings call, Saylor, whose company Strategy has accumulated $65 billion in Bitcoin since 2020, changed his tune: “We will probably sell some Bitcoin to fund a dividend just to inoculate the market.”
His seeming about-face surprised devotees and analysts. In an interview with Fortune, the laser-eyed icon of Bitcoin bulls defended his rhetorical shift as a strategic brushback aimed at short sellers and Strategy detractors.
“The haters… the skeptics and the short-sellers don’t recognize that we’re just selling a Bitcoin derivative, and we have the option to sell the Bitcoin,” he said.
Saylor added that a widespread belief that Strategy would never offload its crypto hoard has come to fuel a narrative among short-sellers and “Twitter trolls” that the company, if faced with a loan repayment, would invariably sell stock rather than Bitcoin. That would lead to a cascading decline in the stock’s price.
“If you want to defeat that, you have to basically show that you’ll trade the Bitcoin back for the stock, or trade the Bitcoin to meet the liabilities,” Saylor said.
Bitcoin buyers and sellers
Saylor’s concession that Strategy could sell some of its holdings comes amid a broader crypto market downturn that has strained the digital asset treasury model that Saylor pioneered.
In 2025, dozens of small public companies began accumulating cryptocurrency on their balance sheets with the hopes of seeing their stocks pop. These so-called digital asset treasuries were all trying to mirror the success of Strategy, whose market capitalization skyrocketed to over $100 billion in late 2024. (The company is now worth around $63 billion.)
However, in October, after Bitcoin hit an all-time high of around $126,000, the world’s largest cryptocurrency nosedived to around half that amount. In recent weeks, the price has climbed back to around $80,000 but is still about 40% below its October high. Amid the freefall, Strategy copycats like the public companies Nakamoto, Empery Digital, and Sequans have all sold some of their Bitcoin stashes and seen their share prices plummet. For example, the share price for Nakamoto, which raised $710 million last year, has plummeted more than 99%.
Saylor, though, said it was too soon to write these companies off. He advised that they emulate Strategy and create complicated, yield-bearing financial instruments like STRC, a class of stock issued by Saylor’s firm that promises holders 11.5% in annual dividends. “In my experience, no great business was ever created in less than four or five years of difficult work,” he told Fortune. “So, I give these companies five years.”
