Michael Saylor has been dumping his personal exposure to bitcoin while at the same time endorsing taking on debt — even suggesting people mortgage their homes — to buy more. The MicroStrategy founder also taught classes to executives on how to leverage corporate assets and equities to buy the crypto.
This month alone, Saylor has sold over $70 million worth of MicroStrategy stock, while in March he sold $144 million.
Although staggeringly generous figures in their own right, Saylor has not opted to decline these multi-hundred-million dollar options contract vestings, viewing them as compensation for one of the best bets he’s made in his career — levering up MicroStrategy to buy 214,246-and-counting bitcoin.
Buying that much bitcoin on corporate leverage has paid off in spades, adding billions of dollars in market capitalization since the company’s purchase program began. Year to date, Saylor has led on the doubling of MSTR’s share price and commensurate gain of over $10 billion in value.
That Saylor is taking tens of millions of dollars in monthly compensation for his work is no accident. He owns over 56% of voting power over MicroStrategy and can amend the company’s by-laws, consent to mergers, and control board of directors elections. No other public company took on anywhere close to as much leverage and risk to buy bitcoin as MicroStrategy. Saylor led that bold decision and wants his reward.
Read more: How Bitcoin makes Michael Saylor the world’s first trillionaire by 2025
Admittedly, many market participants realize that most of these sales are pre-scheduled vesting of CEO award options. If Saylor didn’t exercise these options on time, they would expire worthless. He could have opted to not exercise them but, well, did and earned hundreds of millions of dollars.
Saylor has also claimed in the past that he intends to purchase bitcoin personally with his savings. So while he might be selling MSTR stock via options awards, he might also be quietly stacking bitcoin into his personal stash.
