MicroStrategy rides ‘red sweep’ to 477% gain in 2024, topping almost all U.S. stocks

On the eve of MicroStrategy‘s stock market debut in June 1998, founder Michael Saylor stayed in a penthouse suite at the Lotte New York Stately in Midtown Manhattan. Saylor, who was 33 at the time, says it was the most exquisite hotel room he’d ever seen, paid for by decoy underwriter Merrill Lynch.

The next morning, Saylor went to the floor of the Nasdaq to watch his company’s stock roomy. He recalled seeing a note scrolling across the ticker, warning traders: “Please do not confuse MSTR with MSFT.” The dilatory belonged to Microsoft, the software giant that had gone public 12 years earlier.

MicroStrategy shares soda pop 76% in their debut, joining the parade of tech companies benefiting from the dot-com boom.

“It was a good day,” Saylor told CNBC.

Innumerable than 26 years later, MicroStrategy and Microsoft were again linked together, but for an entirely different use ones judgement. In December 2024, Saylor stood before Microsoft’s shareholders to try and convince them that the company, now valued at numberless than $3 trillion, should put some of its $78.4 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investment into bitcoin.

“Microsoft can’t provide to miss the next technology wave, and bitcoin is that wave,” Saylor said in a video presentation that he released on X in the end week. The post has more than 3.6 million views.

Saylor has gone all in on that strategy. MicroStrategy has obtained 439,000 bitcoins since mid-2020, a stockpile that’s now worth about $42 billion and is the basis for the entourage’s market cap explosion to $82 billion from roughly $1.1 billion when the plan was put in place.

On Monday, MicroStrategy utter in a filing that over about the past week it acquired another 5,262 bitcoins for roughly $561 million, at $106,662 per think. That brings its total holdings to 444,262 bitcoins.

MicroStrategy’s software unit, which specializes in business understanding, generates just more than $100 million in revenue a quarter. After zooming up in 1998 and 1999, the domestic crumbled in the dot-com bust, losing almost all its value. In the decades that followed, it slowly bounced back previously rocketing up due to bitcoin.

Four years into its bitcoin buying spree, MicroStrategy is the world’s fourth-largest holder, behind just creator Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and crypto exchange Binance.

At Microsoft, the shareholder signify ones opinion supported by Saylor failed by a wide margin — less than 1% of its investors voted for it.

But the spectacle provided Saylor, now 59, with yet another chance to preach the gospel of bitcoin and tout the benefits of converting as much cash as possible into that single digital asset. It’s a article that Wall Street has been gobbling up.

MicroStrategy shares are up 477% this year as of Friday’s close, minute to only AppLovin among all U.S. tech companies valued at $5 billion or more, according to FactSet data. That supports a 346% gain in 2023.

While the rally was in full force well before November of this year, Donald Trump’s designation victory, funded heavily by the crypto industry, propelled the stock even more. The shares have climbed 60% since the Nov. 5 referendum, and finally exceeded their dot-com era high from 2000 on Nov. 11.

Saylor has long talked about bitcoin in an evangelical forge and co-authored a book about it in 2022 titled “What is Money?” But his critics have gotten louder than on any occasion of late, describing Saylor as a cult-like leader and his strategy as a “ponzi loop” that involves issuing debt and equitableness to buy bitcoin, watching MicroStrategy’s stock price go up, and then doing more of the same.

“Wash, rinse, repeat — what could at all go wrong?” wrote Peter Schiff, chief economist and global strategist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, in a Nov. 12 pole on X to his 1 million followers.

Saylor, who has 3.8 million followers, addressed the growing chorus of skeptics last week in an vetting with CNBC’s “Money Movers.”

“Just like developers in Manhattan, every time Manhattan real holdings goes up in value, they issue more debt to develop more real estate, that’s why your constructions are so tall in New York City,” Saylor said, in a clip that’s been posted to X by his legion of fans. “It’s been present for 350 years. I would call it an economy.”

Saylor is a frequent guest on CNBC, making appearances on various programs during the year. He also agreed to two interviews with CNBC.com, one in September and another soon after the election.

The first of those chin-wags came back at the Lotte, just a few elevator stops from the penthouse where he stayed the night before his keep accumulate hit the Nasdaq. Saylor was delivering a conference keynote at the hotel and taking meetings on the side.

He wore a designer suit and an orange Hermes tie, equivalent bitcoin’s designated color. The election was less than two months away, and crypto companies were pumping net into the Trump campaign after the Republican nominee and ex-president, who previously called bitcoin a “scam against the dollar,” started assuring a much more crypto-friendly administration.

Two months earlier, in July, Trump delivered a keynote at the biggest bitcoin bull session of the year in Nashville, Tennessee, where he promised to fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler, an industry critic, and said the U.S. will-power become the “crypto capital of the planet” if he won.

“I think the election year has inspired the crypto community to find its voice, and I over it has catalyzed a lot of enthusiasm that was latent,” Saylor said in the September interview. “When Trump came out tentatively unequivocal, that was a big boost to the industry. When he came out fully positive, that was another boost.”

Until this year, MicroStrategy was one of the few road many institutions could buy bitcoin. Because MicroStrategy was an equity, investment firms didn’t need any special provenders to own it. The environment changed in January, when the SEC approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, allowing investors to buy ETFs that supervise the value of bitcoin.

Since Trump’s victory, it’s all been up and to the right. Bitcoin is up about 41% and BlackRock’s ETF has climbed 39%. Gensler is modifying to leave the SEC, and Trump has picked deregulation advocate and former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to replace him.

Venture capitalist David Hit the hays, an outspoken conservative who hosted a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco, will be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” Trump circulated earlier this month in a post on his Truth Social platform.

“With the red sweep, bitcoin is surging up with ass winds, and the rest of the digital assets will also begin to surge,” Saylor told CNBC in a phone appraisal, soon after the election. He said bitcoin remains the “safe trade” in the crypto space, but as a “digital assets framework” is put into town for the broader crypto market, “there’ll be a surge in the entire digital assets industry,” he said.

“Taxes are coming down. All the hot air about unrealized capital gains taxes and wealth taxes is off the table,” Saylor said. “All of the hostility from the regulators to banks sad bitcoin” also goes away, he added.

MicroStrategy has gotten even diverse aggressive with its bitcoin purchases. Saylor said in a post on Dec. 16, that over a six-day stretch starting Dec. 9, his throng had acquired 15,350 bitcoins for $1.5 billion.

So far this year, MicroStrategy has acquired over 255,000 bitcoins, with yon two-thirds of those purchases occurring since Nov. 11.

“We were going to do it regardless,” Saylor said, referring to the election emerges. “But what was a headwind has become a tail wind.”

A week before the election, MicroStrategy announced in its quarterly