Twelve years ago today, on 19 December 2013, Michael Saylor famously tweeted that “Bitcoin’s days are numbered”, adding that it seemed likely to “suffer the same fate as online gambling”.
Yes, you read that right, the man now widely regarded as the face of corporate Bitcoin adoption once dismissed it outright. Today, the company he founded, MicroStrategy (now rebranded as Strategy in early 2025), stands as the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, with approximately 671,268 BTC on its balance sheet as of mid-December 2025, acquired for a total cost of around $50.33 billion (average price about $74,972 per BTC). At current prices near $87,000–$88,000, those holdings are valued at roughly $59–$60 billion, representing about 3.2% of Bitcoin’s total circulating supply.
Saylor frequently likens Bitcoin to prime central real estate in Dubai or Manhattan, scarce, highly coveted “digital property” in cyberspace that generates economic value simply by existing in a prime location, with its fixed supply of 21 million coins making it the apex form of capital in the digital age.
The man whose tech business once competed fiercely in the business intelligence space (MicroStrategy went public in 1998 and briefly rivalled emerging players before the dot-com crash hit hard, leading to a major accounting restatement in 2000 and a sharp decline as Microsoft dominated the broader software landscape) resurrected the firm spectacularly. He made Bitcoin its primary treasury reserve asset starting in 2020, a move that transformed the company from a struggling software provider into what Saylor calls the world’s first “Bitcoin Treasury Company”. This strategy has involved raising billions through convertible debt and at-the-market equity offerings to aggressively accumulate BTC, effectively pivoting the business toward Bitcoin development, financial instruments, and leveraged exposure while maintaining its core enterprise analytics software operations.
Key facts about MicroStrategy/Strategy as of late 2025:
- Holds the most Bitcoin of any public company, far ahead of competitors.
- Stock (NASDAQ: MSTR) has delivered extraordinary returns, outperforming even Microsoft’s all-time gains since the late 1990s in percentage terms, thanks to the Bitcoin bet.
- Generates modest revenue from its traditional BI software (around $475 million annually), but the balance sheet is now dominated by Bitcoin, with the company positioning itself as a hybrid software-Bitcoin entity exploring Bitcoin-backed credit and digital capital innovations.
It is fair to say that Michael Saylor stayed open-minded, and that flexibility has paid off handsomely. His dramatic reversal serves as a powerful reminder to us all never to count something out just because we encounter it early in its evolutionary curve. MicroStrategy stands as a shining example that keeping an open mind, and refusing to set opinions in stone, ranks amongst the most prominent indicators of long-term success in any market.