Michael Saylor – the man behind software giant MicroStrategy and a major crypto bull – has paid off a $200 million+ loan obtained from the now failed crypto bank Silvergate and has purchased even more bitcoin units, thus bringing the company’s total BTC holdings to nearly $4 billion.
Michael Saylor Won’t Give Up on BTC
On the one hand, this is a positive story. Saylor and MicroStrategy were literally billions of dollars in debt in 2022 thanks to the ongoing bear run. The price of bitcoin was hit extremely hard and wound up losing more than 70 percent of its value over the course of 12 short months, falling from its new all-time high of $68,000 per unit (achieved in November of 2021) and dipping into the mid-$16K range by the end of 2022. It was a sad and ugly sight to see.
Institutional players like MicroStrategy suffered greatly. The bitcoin-related decisions made by Saylor led to his official step down from the CEO position he had held with the company for over 30 years, and he switched over to the role of executive chairman. The fact that the company has managed to pull itself out of the doldrums and ultimately pay off one of its biggest loans is a good sign that things are perhaps picking up not just for the enterprise, but for the digital currency space.
However, as we’ve seen by now, Saylor’s love of BTC has gone a little overboard at times, and he arguably rushes into things without really thinking about them as much as he should. Right now, BTC and its altcoin cousins are enduring a bit of a bull run, a solid change from 2022. It’s nice to sit back and watch, though it would be incorrect to assume that we’re fully out of the darkness and there isn’t more space to improve and heal.
The fact remains that BTC is nowhere near where it was a year and a half ago, and the idea that Saylor would simply jump all the way back into the bitcoin bin without allowing more time to go by is a bit concerning. It suggests that he hasn’t really learned his lesson from the past yet, and thus MicroStrategy could be in for more pain before it’s able to fully remove the bandages from its former wounds.
In late March, Saylor issued the following statement on Twitter:
MicroStrategy repaid its $205M Silvergate loan at a 22 percent discount.
So Many Banks Are Collapsing
Silvergate was one of several banks to crumble and collapse in recent weeks, with others being Silicon Valley and Signature.
The financial catastrophe has also spread to Europe, with institutions such as Credit Suisse being on the verge of crashing and burning before it was saved by a $3 billion-bearing UBS.
