Michael Saylor spent years telling the internet he would never sell Bitcoin. Last week he hinted he might, the market lost its mind, and so this week Strategy bought another $43 million of it.
On a weekend podcast, Saylor cleaned up his own quote, saying the line he meant was "never be a net seller of Bitcoin," not "never sell your Bitcoin." Slightly different, way less viral.
Hours after the podcast dropped, Strategy announced it had picked up 535 more Bitcoin at an average price of $80,340 per coin, bringing total holdings to 818,869 BTC and a value near $61.9 billion.
That move also breaks a one-week pause in buying that had Bitcoin watchers asking what the company was up to.
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Strategy now has a complicated funding stack, with the piece that started the panic being a preferred stock called STRC that pays a quarterly cash dividend at an effective yield around 11.5%. Strategy sold $3.2 billion of it in April alone.
That dividend cost runs $80 to $90 million per quarter, and Saylor's argument is that as long as Strategy issues new STRC fast enough, dividends get covered without selling any Bitcoin.
The break-even pace, he said, is 2.3% of holdings per year, with current pace running 15% to 20%.
CEO Phong Le put it simpler: "math over ideology." If selling Bitcoin ever becomes a better move than selling stock to cover dividends, the company will sell Bitcoin.
That is what spooked traders. The door to a Strategy sell, however small, is now officially open.
JPMorgan analysts now estimate Strategy could buy as much as $30 billion of Bitcoin this year if its pace holds, dwarfing the dividend obligations many times over.
Outside critics piled on, with Peter Schiff calling the arrangement a Ponzi scheme and Saylor shrugging him off as someone who does not like anything in crypto.
Other voices in the space pushed back too. Andrew Webley, who runs UK-based Smarter Web Company, told Decrypt the disclosure is actually a sign that Bitcoin treasury firms are growing up.
Bitcoin is trading around $81,200, just under last week's $82,496 high. The prediction market Myriad still gives an 88% chance the next big move is up to $84,000.
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