Michael Saylor is actively pushing back on criticism of MicroStrategy’s (now sometimes called “Strategy”) latest Bitcoin sales plan.
He’s reiterating the long-term HODL thesis on X and in interviews circulating right now.
The pushback comes after a surprising moment on a recent Strategy earnings call. Saylor, whose company has accumulated $65 billion in Bitcoin since 2020 appeared to change his tune, saying: “We will probably sell some Bitcoin to fund a dividend just to inoculate the market.”
That comment raised eyebrows, given that as recently as October, Saylor had written on X: “You do not sell your Bitcoin.”
A Calculated Provocation, Not a Retreat
In a follow-up interview with Fortune, Saylor clarified that the remarks were a calculated move rather than a retreat from his core thesis.
He defended the rhetorical shift as a strategic brushback aimed at short sellers and Strategy detractors, saying: “The haters… the skeptics and the short-sellers don’t recognize that we’re just selling a Bitcoin derivative, and we have the option to sell the Bitcoin.”
Saylor’s concern is specific. He argued that a widespread belief that Strategy would never offload its crypto hoard had come to fuel a narrative among short-sellers and “Twitter trolls” that the company, if faced with a loan repayment, would be forced to sell stock rather than Bitcoin which would trigger a cascading decline in share price.
“If you want to defeat that,” Saylor said, “you have to basically show that you’ll trade the Bitcoin back for the stock, or trade the Bitcoin to meet the liabilities.”
No Forced Sale, No Credit Risk
On the question of forced selling more broadly, Saylor has been equally direct. He called concerns about a forced Bitcoin liquidation “an unfounded concern” during a CNBC interview, reaffirming the company’s commitment to ongoing purchases.
He pointed to the company’s balance sheet, saying: “Our net leverage ratio is half the typical investment grade company.
We’ve got 50 years’ worth of dividends in Bitcoin, and two and a half years’ worth of dividends just in cash.”
Strategy CEO Phong Le backed that view on the earnings call.
Le said Bitcoin would need to crash to $8,000 and stay there for five to six years before it could pose a real threat to Strategy’s convertible debt.
Saylor added that even a steep drop would not necessarily force his hand: “If Bitcoin falls 90% for the next four years, we’ll refinance the debt. We’ll just roll it forward.”
The Copycat Collapse
The broader context matters here. In 2025, dozens of small public companies began accumulating cryptocurrency on their balance sheets, trying to mirror Strategy’s success after its market capitalization skyrocketed to over $100 billion in late 2024. That wave has since pulled back hard.
After Bitcoin hit an all-time high of around $126,000 in October, the price nosedived to roughly half that amount. In recent weeks it has climbed back to around $80,000, still about 40% below its October peak.
Strategy’s imitators have fared far worse. Companies like Nakamoto, Empery Digital, and Sequans all sold some of their Bitcoin holdings and saw their share prices plummet with Nakamoto, which raised $710 million last year, down more than 99%. Saylor, though, is not writing them off.
He told Fortune that no great business was built quickly and advised these companies to emulate Strategy’s more sophisticated financial engineering, including yield-bearing instruments.
The Bitcoin Yield Machine
That engineering is central to how Saylor frames the entire model. He invented a metric called “Bitcoin yield,” which measures the percentage growth in BTC holdings per diluted share.
The argument is that if the Bitcoin stack grows faster than the share count, each existing share represents more Bitcoin over time even as total shares increase.
In 2024, Bitcoin yield hit 74.3%, and in 2025 it came in at 22.8%.
Saylor calls Strategy a “Bitcoin Treasury Company” , a label the name change in early 2025 made official.
To feed that treasury, the company uses proceeds from equity issuances, convertible bonds, and software operations to accumulate Bitcoin continuously.
The logic, as Saylor has put it repeatedly: borrow at low interest rates to acquire an asset that historically appreciates far faster.
The $10 Million Prediction
On long-term price expectations, Saylor is not hedging.
He reiterated that Strategy will keep buying Bitcoin every quarter and predicted that it will outperform the S&P 500 over the next four to eight years.
He has also made bolder claims in viral video clips, stating: “If people in the rest of the world knew what I know… Bitcoin will go to $10 million tomorrow.”
For now, the central question is whether the flywheel can keep turning.
If Bitcoin recovers above Strategy’s $75,694 average cost and the NAV premium returns to even 1.5x, the company can issue stock at a premium, buy more Bitcoin, increase BTC per share, and repeat the cycle.
The next 18 months, analysts say, will determine whether Saylor’s bet enters the financial history books as visionary or cautionary.
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