Crypto Twitter spent a week convinced that Michael Saylor finally blinked. Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin, and the man who tells everyone to never sell suddenly had to explain himself. So I sat down with him at BTC Prague and asked him directly. What followed was one of the sharpest conversations I have recorded for New Era Finance.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Strategy bought 175,000 Bitcoin in 2026, roughly 20 percent of all Bitcoin purchased this year by Saylor's count, and sold 32. That is two basis points of the position. |
| 2Saylor calls the AI boom a "black hole" that pulled an estimated 10 to 20 billion dollars out of the crypto economy. He expects that capital to rotate back once the AI deal frenzy settles. |
| 3If Bitcoin appreciates just 3 percent a year, Strategy says it can pay its dividends forever. At zero percent for 40 years, the company still has decades of coverage. |
| 4My read: the outrage over 32 Bitcoin says more about the market's nerves than about Strategy. The machine did exactly what it was built to do. |
The sale that put Michael Saylor on trial
The setup was irresistible. Bitcoin is roughly 50 percent below its October top. Sentiment is bruised. And then an 8-K appears showing that Strategy, the company built on never selling, sold Bitcoin. We covered the storm at Cryptofocus when it broke, in our analysis of why Strategy sells Bitcoin to cover dividends and in our look at how big the sale really was. The community wanted a scapegoat, and it picked the most visible man in Bitcoin.
When I put that to Michael Saylor in Prague, he did not flinch. He went straight to the numbers.
“Our company bought 175,000 Bitcoin this year, which is like 20 percent of all the Bitcoin ever bought. We bought it in the middle of a bear-market/" data-term-title="Bear Market" role="button" tabindex="0">bear market. We sold 32.”
Michael Saylor, New Era Finance
He kept going. “32 works out to be two basis points. It’s so de minimis as to be inconsequential. But everybody wants to vent.” That last part is the real story. Saylor has a theory about why a rounding error became a headline, and it has nothing to do with treasury policy.
“The crypto community at large, it’s like a hundred million people and they all have the same blood sugar level, and it’s the Bitcoin price.”
Michael Saylor
When the price is down, everyone is grumpy and looking for someone to blame. He added a media diagnosis that anyone who spends time on X will recognize: “The most inflammatory, enraged, indignant comment runs viral the hardest.” A measured explanation of basis points never trends. An accusation does.
You can watch the full conversation here, and I would genuinely recommend the whole 40 minutes:
This interview is an episode of my podcast New Era Finance. Subscribe there if you want these conversations the moment they drop.
A treasury company is not a hodler
The confusion, Saylor argues, comes from mixing up two different actors. Michael Saylor the individual has one playbook. He told me his personal position is untouched: “I bought a bunch of Bitcoin. I haven’t sold a single sat.” His advice for individual investors has not changed either.
“Take the money you don’t need for four years or longer. Buy Bitcoin, leave it there forever, and your grandchildren will thank you.”
Michael Saylor
Strategy is a different animal. It is a treasury company that sold 10.5 billion dollars of its STRC credit instrument and bought 10 billion dollars of Bitcoin with the proceeds. Credit investors expect their dividend. Equity investors expect the company to defend the stock when short sellers attack it. Saylor reached for an analogy that will follow him around for a while.
“It’s kind of like a woman’s not going to marry you if you’re not going to defend her. Everybody wants security. And our job as fiduciaries is we need to defend the credit investors and we need to defend the equity investors.”
Michael Saylor
Occasionally that duty means selling a sliver of Bitcoin so the machine keeps its access to capital. In his words: buy 20, sell 1, and the credit investors fund the next 20. Refusing on principle would be self-defeating, and he put it in one line I have been thinking about since Prague: “If we lose the confidence of the capital markets, we’re buying zero Bitcoin.”
The scoreboard backs him up, at least so far. “That’s why our company went from a 600 million dollar enterprise value to an 85 billion dollar enterprise value. It’s because the machine works.” You do not have to like the model. But calling two basis points a betrayal is a reading of the chart, not of the company.
An AI black hole is eating crypto’s capital
The question I really wanted answered is the one every reader here is asking. Consumer sentiment is weak, the S&P 500 sits near record highs, and Bitcoin is the asset lagging everything. Why? Saylor’s framework starts with a definition: “You can think of Bitcoin as like risk capital squared.” Whatever moves risk assets moves Bitcoin harder, in both directions.
Then comes the mechanism. In his telling, about 500 billion dollars of capital is being pulled into the AI complex right now. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are each raising tens of billions, with hundreds of billions more in private credit behind the scenes to fund data centers.
“What you have is an AI-driven black hole orbiting through the capital solar system. Massive gravitational pull. It’s pulling credit money. It’s pulling equity money.”
Michael Saylor
That black hole, he estimates, has pulled 10 to 20 billion dollars out of the crypto economy, including 5 to 10 billion of institutional ETF selling. Every banker on Wall Street is marketing a hot AI deal, and mature money rotates toward the guaranteed pop. His conclusion is the most quotable market call of the episode: “When we get through IPO summer or AI summer, I think a lot of that hot money will come back into Bitcoin because Bitcoin is now undervalued.” He expects normalization in the third and fourth quarter.
I pushed back. At some point, does he ever question the thesis itself? The gap with the old M2 overlay keeps widening. His answer was history. “It’s not uncommon for there to be a major drawdown each year. This drawdown is 50 percent. But the drawdown in ’21-’22 was 75 percent. So we’ve lived through more brutal drawdowns.” Five major drawdowns in five years, and he refuses to let a price signal a few months old override a four-year horizon. Then he stacked the fundamentals: “The president supports Bitcoin, the vice president supports Bitcoin, the head of the Fed supports Bitcoin, the head of the Treasury, the head of the SEC, the head of the CFTC.” Add a hundred ETFs, bank support, and Bitcoin dominance recovering from 41 percent in 2021 to almost 70 percent today, and you understand why he sounds calm.
What if Bitcoin goes nowhere for 40 years?
This is the stress test I wanted him to run on his own machine. STRC pays its dividend regardless of what Bitcoin does. So what happens if Bitcoin simply stalls? Not crashes. Just goes sideways for decades. He took the question apart with visible pleasure.
“If Bitcoin stalls, which means goes up zero percent a year for 40 years, then sometime in 35 years, if we do nothing, we wouldn’t be able to pay the dividend. We wouldn’t do nothing. We would refinance or adjust.”
Michael Saylor
The numbers that matter are zero, three and nine, he explained. At zero percent appreciation, Strategy has 30 to 40 years of dividend coverage. At 3 percent, roughly the pace of inflation, something remarkable happens: “If it appreciates 3 percent a year, we can pay the dividends forever without selling a single share of common stock. The machine finances itself forever.” And if Bitcoin compounds at his stochastic cost of capital, 8 to 10 percent, the equity outperforms Bitcoin itself. People assume he needs 30 percent a year. He expects 30. He needs 3.
For the doubters he had a sharper filter. Credit investors only need to believe Bitcoin is legitimate and not going to zero. “That’s like investing in New York City real estate thinking that New York’s going to sink 10 feet a year. Would you buy New York if New York was sinking 10 feet a year into the Atlantic? Of course you wouldn’t.” He also pointed out that Strategy publishes its coverage numbers on its website, updated every 15 seconds. The company disclosed the 32 Bitcoin sale voluntarily. It was too small to require an 8-K at all.
The Warren Buffett moment is still coming
Where does Bitcoin sit in the adoption curve? Saylor’s answer is my favorite part of the episode. He compares it to Amazon in 2010 and Apple in 2012. By then, both networks were fundamentally unstoppable. Conventional investors still hated them. It took a decade before the consensus flipped from “awful business” to “of course we need Amazon.” He sees Bitcoin in exactly that window.
“It’s been copied 10,000 times. It’s the winner. It hasn’t been hacked. Everything else has been hacked.”
Michael Saylor
The conventional thinkers, 99 percent of the money in the world in his estimate, will not get it “until they’re beat over the head with it.” That is not an insult, it is a pattern. Buffett ignored tech for decades, then bought 50 billion dollars of Apple and watched it double. “We’ll have that Warren Buffett moment with Bitcoin. Not this year. Maybe not next year. It doesn’t matter.” The underlying question, he says, is whether the world needs a non-sovereign, deflationary store of value. His test: “Ask anybody that’s ever had all their money stolen from them anywhere in the world by a hostile government.”
Better hated than irrelevant
Near the end I asked him how he deals with being the market’s favorite target. His answer explains a lot about how he operates. In 2019 nobody cared what he thought. “I could have tweeted to the world and got 18 views and one like.” MicroStrategy spent 40 million dollars a year on marketing and could not get a single interview. Today he has five million followers, the stock trades about 2.5 billion dollars a day against 2 million a day in 2020, and there is 40 billion dollars of open interest in the derivatives market.
“There’s something worse than being hated or having negative opinions. It’s being irrelevant. If you’re irrelevant, when you get up in the morning and no one cares whether you live or die, no one knows who you are, no one’s buying your stock, no one’s selling your stock. That’s death.”
Michael Saylor
I told him at the table what I will repeat here. The attention cuts both ways. The market makes him the personification of Bitcoin, but the actual market impact of Strategy’s moves is smaller than his critics claim, and the anger this week proved it. Two basis points moved nothing except the timeline. What I take away from Prague is a man who has made peace with being the lightning rod, because the alternative is silence. Whether you think the leverage machine ends in glory or in tears, he is telling you exactly what it does, every week, in public.
This conversation is exactly why I started the New Era Finance podcast: long-form talks with the people actually building this market, past guests include Raoul Pal, Arthur Hayes and Lyn Alden. If you got value out of this one, subscribe on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week. Follow me on X via @CryptoMichNL for daily updates. See you at the next episode. Ciao!
