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.
