Michael Saylor: how Strategy became the largest corporate holder with 849,327 Bitcoin

Michael Saylor is the founder and executive chairman of Strategy, the former software company MicroStrategy, and since August 2020 he has turned it into the largest publicly listed holder of Bitcoin. According to a mandatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated November 2, 2026, Strategy owns 849,327 BTC, bought at an average price of $75,451. That is about 4 percent of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist.

What is on record: Strategy finances these holdings almost entirely through the capital markets, with new shares, convertible bonds and a series of its own preferred shares. Our assessment follows further down, kept separate from the figures. The model works as long as investors are willing to pay more for the stock than for the Bitcoin behind it. For investors in Germany, Strategy therefore first raises a question of access: anyone who wants a share in Saylor's bet buys a US stock through a crypto broker or a brokerage account, under tax rules quite different from those for Bitcoin itself.

Who is Michael Saylor? From MIT student to software founder

Michael Jerry Saylor was born on February 4, 1965 in Lincoln, Nebraska, and grew up in Fairborn, Ohio, near an Air Force base. In 1983 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship and studied aeronautics and astronautics as well as the history of science. An illness ruled out the pilot career the scholarship had been meant to lead to.

At MIT, Saylor met Sanju Bansal in the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. After a stint at the chemicals group DuPont, where he built computer models of market development, he founded MicroStrategy with Bansal in 1989 and ran it as chief executive officer until 2022. The company developed business intelligence software, programs that let companies analyse large volumes of data and turn them into reports. That business still exists: in the third quarter of 2026 it brought Strategy $125.4 million in revenue at a gross margin of 71 percent. Next to the billions on the Bitcoin balance sheet, the software has become a footnote.

Inventor and author: The Mobile Wave

Saylor is not only an entrepreneur. By 2016 he had been granted 31 patents, according to his biography. In June 2012 Perseus Books published his book "The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything", which entered the New York Times hardcover bestseller list at number seven. Bitcoin did not yet feature; the book was about smartphones and their consequences for commerce, medicine and education.

IPO and first fortune

In June 1998 Saylor took MicroStrategy public, selling four million shares at $12 each. The price doubled on the first day of trading. By early 2000 Saylor's fortune was estimated at $7 billion, and Washingtonian magazine listed him at the time as the richest man in the Washington area.

Dotcom bubble 2000: the crash that shaped Saylor

Strategy's story cannot be understood without the year 2000. Within a year, MicroStrategy stock had climbed from $7 to as much as $333. On March 20, 2000 the company announced that it would restate its results for the two previous years. The stock fell 62 percent to $120 in a single day, and Saylor's fortune shrank by about $6 billion. The collapse is now counted among the milestones of the bursting of the dotcom bubble.

Saylor stayed at the helm, and the company survived as a profitable but barely growing software vendor. For twenty years MicroStrategy was an unremarkable technology stock. It was precisely from this position, with stable revenue and a large cash reserve that in Saylor's words was losing purchasing power, that the decision of 2020 emerged.

From sceptic to Bitcoin maximalist

Saylor was not always convinced. In December 2013, when Bitcoin cost just under $700, he wrote on Twitter that Bitcoin's days were numbered and compared the cryptocurrency to online gambling. In a podcast with Anthony Pompliano in September 2020, he said he had simply forgotten that post. Today Saylor calls Bitcoin humanity's most valuable property and a hedge against inflation, a thesis that critics such as gold investor Peter Schiff have disputed for years; his mantra of digital capital runs through every Strategy presentation.

First Bitcoin purchase in August 2020: $250 million instead of a cash reserve

On the earnings call for the second quarter of 2020, Saylor announced that MicroStrategy would consider putting its cash reserve into Bitcoin, gold or other real assets instead of dollars. The first purchase followed in August 2020: 21,454 Bitcoin for $250 million. A further $175 million followed in September, and on December 21, 2020 the company already reported 70,470 BTC at an average price of $15,964.

With this step MicroStrategy created a new type of company. A Bitcoin treasury company is a listed company that holds Bitcoin as the main asset on its balance sheet and raises capital specifically to buy more of it. There are now dozens of imitators worldwide, from Japan to Europe; we have also covered the best-known listed companies that buy Bitcoin.

In August 2022 Saylor handed the chief executive role to the company's president, Phong Le, and became executive chairman. He said he wanted to concentrate fully on the Bitcoin strategy and on representing it in public. In August 2024 the company split its stock 10 for 1, and in February 2025 it renamed itself Strategy and switched to orange as its brand colour.

How does Strategy finance its Bitcoin purchases? Shares, convertible bonds and preferred stock

The software business generates nowhere near enough to buy Bitcoin worth billions. Strategy therefore raises the money in three ways, whose weight has shifted over the years.

New shares through the ATM programme

An at-the-market (ATM) programme lets a company continuously sell new shares of its own directly on the stock exchange instead of placing one large capital increase in a single go. Strategy uses this route heavily: in the third quarter of 2026 alone, MSTR shares brought in net proceeds of about $5.41 billion. Since the start of the year the company says it has raised $21.23 billion in capital, which it says makes it the fourth-largest issuer of equity in the US.

Convertible bonds as an early tool

A convertible bond is a loan that the creditor can later exchange for shares. For Strategy this was a cheap route in the years after 2020, because investors accepted low interest rates in return for the conversion option. The debt does sit on the balance sheet, however, and its interest has to be paid even when the Bitcoin price falls.

Preferred shares STRK, STRF, STRD and STRC

Since 2025 Strategy has relied mainly on its own preferred shares, which the company markets as Digital Credit. Preferred shares pay a fixed or variable dividend and are served before common shareholders in a liquidation. The four securities STRF, STRC, STRK and STRD are listed on Nasdaq, and STRE is listed in Luxembourg. The variable dividend on STRC has stood at 12 percent a year since July 2026; since November 1, 2026 Strategy pays it daily, and the other preferred shares will follow on January 1, 2027. By the end of October 2026, Strategy had paid $1.48 billion in dividends on all its preferred shares combined.

Bitcoin holdings in November 2026: 849,327 BTC at an average price of $75,451

Strategy usually reports its latest position on Mondays in a Form 8-K filed with the SEC. The filing of November 2, 2026 lists 811 newly bought BTC for about $65.5 million, an average of $80,846 per Bitcoin. They were paid for by selling about 1.18 million MSTR shares. That brings Strategy's holdings to 849,327 BTC.

The trend can be read from three reference dates:

• December 21, 2020: 70,470 BTC, average price $15,964, total cost $1.125 billion
• October 25, 2026: 848,517 BTC, average price $75,446, total cost $64.02 billion
• November 1, 2026: 849,327 BTC, average price $75,451

Our own calculation: 849,327 BTC is just over 4.04 percent of the maximum of 21 million Bitcoin provided for by the protocol. On October 23, 2026 Strategy put the market value of its holdings at $68.90 billion, at a Bitcoin price of $81,200. That is the figure in the quarterly report of October 29, 2026. The book gain is therefore just under $5 billion, but it melts quickly: if Bitcoin falls below the average price of just over $75,000, the holdings are underwater on paper.

Record profit on paper

Because Strategy carries Bitcoin at market value, every price move feeds straight into earnings. In the third quarter of 2026, Bitcoin rose 43 percent according to Strategy and MSTR stock 76 percent. The company reported operating income of $20.91 billion and net income of $19.53 billion, almost entirely from revaluing its coins. A quarter with a falling price turns the same calculation negative without a single Bitcoin being sold.

BTC Yield at minus 3.7 percent: why Strategy is selling Bitcoin again in 2026

The metric by which Saylor himself measures his model is called BTC Yield. It shows how much the Bitcoin holdings per diluted share change. If it rises, each shareholder owns more Bitcoin on paper than before, even though new shares have been issued. In 2026 the calculation ran the wrong way: up to October 25, BTC Yield stood at minus 3.7 percent. The holdings grew by 26 percent since the start of the year, but the share count grew faster.

On top of that, Strategy now sells according to plan, having last disposed of a small amount for tax reasons at the end of 2022. The board has approved a BTC monetisation programme. Under it, Strategy may sell Bitcoin to build a dollar reserve of up to $1.25 billion, to pay dividends and interest, and to buy back its own securities. By the end of October the company had sold Bitcoin worth about $431.8 million this way, mainly for preferred dividends and to repurchase STRC securities that had fallen below their $100 par value.

Strategy puts its dollar reserve at $4.83 billion, or $5.07 billion including other cash. According to the company, that covers 3.4 years of dividends and interest. At the same time, chief financial officer Andrew Kang leaves the company on November 5, 2026; from January 2027 the role passes to Reza Virasteh, who has so far been responsible for operations.

Risks of the Saylor strategy: dilution, dividend burden and price dependence

The model has three weak points that can reinforce one another.

Dilution: each new share spreads the Bitcoin holdings across more owners. For existing shareholders this only pays off as long as the stock trades at a premium to the value of the Bitcoin per share. Without that premium, Strategy buys less Bitcoin per share with each new share than it gives away; the negative BTC Yield of 2026 shows exactly this effect.

Dividend burden: according to Saylor, about $16 billion in par value sits in ten listed Digital Credit securities, of which Strategy claims an 84 percent market share. In the third quarter of 2026 alone, Strategy paid $419.6 million in preferred dividends. These payments continue regardless of the Bitcoin price.

Price dependence: if Bitcoin falls far and for long, the share price, the premium and the room for new capital all shrink at the same time. What remains is the dollar reserve and, in the extreme case, sales from the holdings. In February we worked through how far Bitcoin would have to fall before the model seriously wobbles in a calculation on Strategy's balance sheet.

Our assessment

In our editorial view, Strategy in 2026 is no longer a pure Bitcoin bet but a financing vehicle with Bitcoin as collateral. The shift towards a dollar reserve, the daily dividend and the scheduled sales from the holdings point that way. Against this, the core is unchanged: 849,327 BTC, a dollar reserve covering 3.4 years of payments, and a founder who in his own words stands at the start of the next Bitcoin bull market. Whoever buys the stock is also buying Saylor's ability to keep raising capital. A total loss of the money invested cannot be ruled out with a stock like this.

How Saylor presents himself in public shows in almost every market phase; in April 2026, for example, he called for buying Bitcoin on Good Friday after the price, according to our report of April 4, had fallen by about 46 percent.

Strategy stock or Bitcoin directly: capital gains tax versus the holding period in Germany

Strategy stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker MSTR and can be found in German brokerage accounts under ISIN US5949724083 and German securities code 722713. For investors in Germany, taxation differs fundamentally from buying Bitcoin directly.

Stock: price gains on MSTR are subject to Germany's flat 25 percent withholding tax plus the solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax. There is no holding period; the gain is taxable even after ten years. Investment income stays tax-free up to the saver's allowance of €1,000 a year (€2,000 for joint filers). Losses from share sales can only be offset against gains from shares. Strategy pays no dividend on its common stock, so US withholding tax does not normally arise.

Bitcoin directly: a sale is a private disposal under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. If more than one year passes between purchase and sale, the gain is tax-free. Within that period your personal tax rate applies; if gains stay below the exemption limit of €1,000 a year, they are tax-free. So whoever holds Bitcoin for more than twelve months keeps the whole gain; with the stock, about a quarter goes to the tax office in every case.

In short: the stock offers leveraged exposure through a company, with all the financing risks, and a permanent tax liability. Your own Bitcoin is more direct and tax-free after a year, but requires custody in a wallet or on an exchange. A third option is exchange-traded products; our overview of crypto ETFs and ETNs in Germany shows which are available there.

Bitcoin treasury on Saylor's model: what sets Strategy apart from its imitators

Many companies have copied the model; none has reached comparable size. The gap is not just in the holdings. Strategy is the only company with a whole family of its own preferred shares on the market, a regular weekly filing with the SEC and a founder who since 2020 has appeared almost exclusively as an ambassador for Bitcoin. Smaller treasury companies usually finance themselves through a single route, typically new shares, and so run out of fresh capital sooner in weak market phases.

For reading the Bitcoin price, Strategy nevertheless plays a dual role. As a buyer, the company takes thousands of coins off the market in strong weeks. As a seller, even if only for dividends, it can also create supply since 2026. News of Strategy's purchases and sales therefore regularly moves the market, as the purchase of 811 BTC in the first week of November did most recently.

Strategy and Bitcoin: below $75,451, Saylor's book gain turns into a loss

Michael Saylor has turned a software company scarred by the dotcom crash into the largest publicly listed Bitcoin holder. Whether you want a share in it, and if so by which route, is best decided in three steps:

1. Check your account and costs: for MSTR stock you need a brokerage account with access to US equities. You can compare order fees, trading venues and spreads in our broker comparison.
2. Weigh it against the direct route: if you would rather hold Bitcoin itself than bet on the company, buy on an exchange or through a broker that offers crypto trading. Which providers are cheap is shown in our comparison buy Bitcoin.
3. Document tax from the start: with the stock, the custodian bank handles the withholding tax; with Bitcoin you have to prove the purchase date and price yourself so that the holding period counts. Suitable tools are listed in our comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of November 6, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)