Enterprise business intelligence (BI) software vendor MicroStrategy has so far purchased over 140,000 Bitcoin (BTC), largely due to the enthusiasm of its executive chairman and former CEO, Michael Saylor. However, not everyone thinks this is necessarily a good thing for the company.
As it happens, Hal Press, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency-focused investment fund North Rock Digital, has voiced concern over MicroStrategy’s large purchases of Bitcoin, stating it was “comically stupid” to leverage a software company to this end in a series of tweets posted on April 8.
Commenting on an April 5 tweet by Bitcoin Magazine, in which the crypto news outlet had highlighted that “MicroStrategy now owns one out of 150 Bitcoin that will ever exist,” considering that the maximum supply of Bitcoin is 21 million, Press had this to say:
“It’s not gonna happen anytime soon (multiple years minimum IMO), but eventually, every single one of Saylor’s coins will need to be sold. When the time eventually comes, it will be a career-making short.”
‘Comically stupid’ strategy
In the following tweet, he ridiculed Saylor’s strategy, arguing that “the idea of taking a software company and levering it to the gills to run a ‘Bitcoin acquisition strategy’ is so comically stupid it’s actually quite funny” and that it would “be so obvious in hindsight.”
That said, Press insisted that his view “genuinely isn’t a comment about Bitcoin,” but that “hijacking a public company and levering it to acquire any asset in a way that adds nothing to its core business just doesn’t make any sense.” As he added, “If he did it to buy ETH, it would be just as silly IMO,” but admitting that it doesn’t mean “he won’t be profitable either, there is a chance he will be.”
Indeed, it is no secret that Saylor is a vocal Bitcoin enthusiast, having hailed the flagship decentralized finance (DeFi) asset as an “economic engine based on a truth machine poised to emerge as a freedom machine,” which is why he led MicroStrategy to adopt the Bitcoin strategy back in August 2020, as Finbold reported in October 2022.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin was at press time trading at the price of $28,373, up 1.59% on the day, as well as gaining 0.48% across the previous week and as much as 40.49% on its monthly chart. This means that the current value of MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin bid stands at close to a staggering $4 billion ($3,972,220,000).
