Michael Saylor, Founder and CEO of MicroStrategy (MSTR) and an outspoken believer in cryptocurrency, shared his latest interview with CNN in a tweet, calling Bitcoin (BTC-USD) “a lifeboat, tossed on a stormy sea, offering hope to anyone in the world that needs to get off their sinking ship.”
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MicroStrategy is primarily a provider of enterprise analytics and mobility software, and one of MSTR’s main corporate strategies is to invest in Bitcoin and hold it for the long term. MicroStrategy boasts of being the world’s largest publicly traded corporate owner of bitcoin. As of May 7, MSTR held around 129,218 bitcoins, and at the current price, it is worth about $2.66 billion.
The current crypto crash has wiped off billions of dollars of investors’ money with no end in sight. Year-to-date, bitcoin has declined nearly 57%, which has led to almost a billion dollars in mark-to-market losses for MSTR.
Nonetheless, Saylor believes this too shall pass. “We’re in here for the long term. Bitcoin is going to outlast all of us… we are witnessing the birth of a new industry during the worst financial crisis of 50 years,” he said in the interview.
The CEO compared the current budding stage of the crypto industry to the decades-old evolution of oil and auto companies. According to Saylor, “lots of them went bust, about 99%, but the rest is history. We’ve got cars, the oil business is a huge business, it changed the future of the world,” he added, “When we look back 100 years no one’s going to remember who made money or losing money building New York City.”
While several crypto fanatics replied with similar enthusiasm, many even quipped about the “lifeboat” comment by sharing memes of sinking ships.
Notably, Saylor also stated that there is no asset under the current economic scenario that can be called a safe haven. “Flight to safety is a grand illusion,” he said. Even if you are holding currency in bank accounts, you end up paying 50% more for oil or wheat in local currency.
Saylor believes Bitcoin is a “digital energy, incorruptible, indestructible, programmable, and it lasts forever.” He added, “You can’t stockpile oil for the next decade. Bitcoin, on the other hand, you can accumulate monthly, you can keep it for your entire life and so it is fundamentally different than anything that’s come before it.”
When asked about how the crypto crash has hurt the average Joe who does not understand the market properly and a majority of investors that still haven’t invested in bitcoin or the other 19,000 digital currencies or tokens, Saylor said, “the average investor has been taken advantage of by traders and wildcat crypto banks.”
Furthermore, he stressed the need for regulations to bring more clarity into the market that “will be good for the mainstream investors, corporations and will make it into an institutional asset class.”
Interestingly, on the company’s take of adding more debt (mostly unsecured) worth $2.2 billion at a blended interest rate of 1.8%, Saylor said, “our balance sheet is great. When the inflation rate is running dramatically higher than the interest rate, you are better off being a debtor than being a creditor.”
All in all, the CEO is headstrong about the fate of bitcoin and the crypto world in general and will continue to bet on these horses – hopefully not the wrong ones.
