Michael Saylor is a Bitcoin billionaire—if he really is the diamond hands he claims to be.
Back in 2020, the Bitcoin bull claimed to personally own 17,732 BTC. Writing on Twitter, the chairman and co-founder of tech company MicroStrategy said that he’d snapped up the huge amount of digital coins for $175.2 million.
Today, that same investment would be worth over $1.1 billion.
It’s possible the tech entrepreneur has sold some of his private stash. But more likely is that he’s bought more—which would cement his status as a huge whale.
MicroStrategy put BTC on its balance sheet in August 2020 to get better returns for company shareholders and fight inflation. Since his company adopted its Bitcoin investing strategy, Saylor has traveled the world preaching “digital gold” as the superior investment.
“I’ve famously said, I’m going to be buying the top forever,” Saylor said just last month. MicroStrategy, which sells data-analyzing software, then a week later spent $155.4 million on more coins.
Since then, the firm continued to buy the asset and now owns 193,000 BTC—or more than $12 billion—in virtual coins.
So far, so good: known as one of the largest institutional holders of Bitcoin, MicroStrategy stock (MSTR on the Nasdaq) is up over 600% since the first buy. Saylor has argued that investors can buy MSTR stock as a safe way to get exposure to Bitcoin.
He has also repeatedly asserted that personally owning Bitcoin is the best way to protect one’s wealth.
“Being able to move the money from a city to another city, from a state to a state, from a country to a country and from a counterparty to a different counterparty—all of these things are are extraordinarily valuable, definitely life and death and many cases—and that’s what Bitcoin gives you that you don’t get with anything else,” he said on the Patrick Bet-David Podcast last year.
How much of a Bitcoin whale is he today? That’s so far unclear. He hasn’t shared an update on his personal stash of BTC recently, and MicroStrategy’s press office and Saylor did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.