MW Michael Saylor said he would never sell bitcoin. Now he says he might.
By Jules Rimmer
Strategy's first-quarter loss is bigger than expected
Michael Saylor is a longstanding torchbearer for bitcoin and his every utterance on bitcoin is subject to forensic scrutiny. The market has been quick to latch onto the possibility he raised of selling some bitcoin at some stage.
Michael Saylor is the bitcoin evangelist who has repeatedly emphasized that he would never sell. However, after his company Strategy announced a net loss of $12.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, Saylor said what had previously been unthinkable: he told investors on its earnings webinar that he would consider selling the cryptocurrency he's long promoted so passionately.
Saylor, Strategy's founder and executive chairman, raised the possibility, telling investors, "We'll probably sell some bitcoin to fund a dividend just to inoculate the market, just to send the message that we did it. 'Look, the company's fine, the market's fine, the world didn't come to an end,'" according to a transcript from S&P Global.
Although Saylor was speaking hypothetically and trying to make the point that the choice to sell bitcoin would be a demonstration of strength, of bitcoin's ability to withstand a disposal by its most relentless advocate, investors were quick to jump on the statement and interpret it as a change of direction, or less of a full-blooded commitment than before.
First-quarter revenues were $124 million, a fraction below the $125 million forecast by analysts, and Phong Le, Strategy's chief executive officer and president, disclosed the world's largest bitcoin treasury company now owns 818,334 bitcoin, worth about $64 billion, at an average price of $75,537. BlackRock $(BLK)$, the world's largest asset manager, held 814,000 coins as of May 4, 2026.
Saylor's Strategy has continued buying buying bitcoin at all prices through the up and down cycle of the last twelve months.
The net loss of $38.25 per share was much worse than the $16.49 per share analysts predicted.
The first-quarter figures are rather backward-looking as bitcoin (BTCUSD) has appreciated sharply since the end of March from around $66,000 to the present level of $81,600. Le noted Strategy has now swung back into a $5 billion profit for the first four months of 2026, for instance. Strategy's stock (MSTR) , which troughed at $106 in February, has also rallied dramatically and touched an intraday high of $190 Tuesday.
Bitcoin benefited from profit-taking in gold (GC00) as the Iran crisis started with traders unwinding long gold/ short bitcoin pair trades. This had the knock-on effect of forcing an unwind of the bitcoin 'basis trade' whereby traders had been short Strategy stock and long bitcoin. Since the start of the war, Strategy outperformed the underlying by around 10 percentage points.
After the results and the webinar, Strategy lost ground and the stock drifted 0.3% lower in premarket trade.
Although the headlines were dominated by Saylor's apparent volte face, the bulk of Saylor's commentary was as bullish as investors have come to expect. Saylor was keen to point out "systemically important banks like Morgan Stanley and Citi, all with intent to integrate bitcoin into their operations," which he interprets as an "embrace of bitcoin as a creditworthy instrument."
Touching again on the possibility of making sales in bitcoin at some stage, Saylor made an analogy between his bitcoin treasury company and a real estate development company that "buys land cheap and and sells it expensively."
On the call with analysts, Saylor struck a typically defiant and combative tone with crypto skeptics: "nothing would make me happier than to rip the faces off skeptics, if you're a short seller, rip your wings off."
-Jules Rimmer
This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 06, 2026 05:32 ET (09:32 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments