When it comes to publicly traded companies that own bitcoin, one firm totally dominates—and it's not Tesla or Square or Coinbase.
It's MicroStrategy, a Virginia-based firm that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud computing. It owns about two-and-a-half times as much bitcoin as Tesla, the second-largest holder of the cryptocurrency.
MicroStrategy is so long on bitcoin because its 57-year-old billionaire CEO, Michael Saylor, had an epiphany during the summer of 2020 when COVID-19 shutdowns caused economic turmoil across the country. Bitcoin, he tells Reason, "is an approximation of a perfect monetary system because it is correct. It has no inflation in it. It's not corruptible because it's decentralized."
Saylor was famous in the late 1990’s, also. He was known for giving speeches that lasted for hours—one article back then compared him to Fidel Castro. MicroStrategy was on my list of top 5 seemingly overvalued stocks in what I called the Internet Bubble Monitor, as of early March 2000.
But then, as Wikipedia reports,
In March 2000, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought charges against Saylor and two other MicroStrategy executives for the company's inaccurate reporting of financial results for the preceding two years.[14] In December 2000, Saylor settled with the SEC without admitting wrongdoing by paying $350,000 in penalties and a personal disgorgement of $8.3 million.[15][16][17] As a result of the restatement of results, the company's stock declined in value and Saylor's net worth fell by $6 billion.
The date that MicroStrategy announced that it needed to restate earnings was March 20. I mentioned it at the time. In hindsight, it was the day that the Dotcom bubble popped.
Everyone but me seems to have forgotten that MicroStrategy once floated on the Internet Bubble.
Now they are floating on Bitcoin.
Caveat Emptor.
actually i remember. i precisely remember this charlie rose interview 1 month before the bubble bursting https://charlierose.com/videos/5142
Arnold - what a weak case against Bitcoin and Saylor! Very unlike you. Where is the substance? I know plenty of honorable people who have settled with the SEC (a notorious bureaucratic bully). That he had like many other to settle with the SEC proves/indicates/suggests next to nothing when it comes to the case for a neutral, global, decentralized, censorship resistant new form of money.