Strategy founder Michael Saylor has claimed that a short seller has been paying for a large number of social media bots to post “nasty, awful cynicism” about his company.
In an interview with Natalie Brunell, Saylor explained that he discovered a covert cyber marketing campaign while looking into the metrics of accounts that received high engagement rates for particularly bearish posts.
Despite widespread concerns about MSTR underperforming BTC on 90% of trading days over a recent 12-month look-back period, Saylor thinks there’s little reason for such virality of bearish posts about him and the world’s largest publicly trader bitcoin (BTC) treasury company.
Saylor claims that, rather than natural behaviors by investing bulls and bears on social media, “a short seller in my stock has actually paid a digital marketing organization to spin up a bunch of bots to post a bunch of nasty, awful, skeptical cynicism.”
According to the leader of the $110 billion enterprise, “it’s very transparent to me that someone paid some money to create the appearance of a protest.”
Read more: How Nasdaq spooked Strategy and crypto treasury stocks
Saylor blames bots for social media bearishness
Many fans and shareholders agreed with Saylor, but skeptics were unconvinced.
“They’re constantly diluting it [MSTR] by issuing new shares forever, which keeps price action suppressed forever,” commented one disenchanted follower.
“So Saylor is blaming his stock decline on Twitter bots and not the infinite dilution,” echoed another.
Blaming short sellers for an underperforming stock price is a perennial tactic of public company executives.
Tesla’s Elon Musk, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Overstock’s Patrick Byrne, Nikola’s Trevor Milton, Enron’s Kenneth Lay, and countless other executives have blamed short sellers for attacking their equities.
