Michael Saylor - The 12-Month Moonshot: Why the Fed's Next Move Guarantees $250k BTC

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]the tailwinds for Bitcoin or the catalyst will be a sessation or resolution to the Gulf War, the the the installment of WASH at the Fed, any any loosening or any forward accommodation and the interest rate monetary policy and then um and then any um positive developments in in trade, right? And those are all of those are positive catalyst and then the the passage of resolution on the clarity act, right? When we get a resolution there, those will be positive macro factors for Bitcoin.

[00:00:42]>> What if the biggest transformation in finance isn't happening on Wall Street, but inside Bitcoin? While most investors are still debating whether crypto is too risky, Michael Sailor is quietly building one of the most aggressive Bitcoin strategies in financial history.

[00:00:59]His company has bought billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, survived brutal bare markets, and created entirely new financial instruments designed around one idea. Bitcoin is becoming the foundation of a new global monetary system. And according to Sailor, we're still early. Please take a little time to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on post notifications for more videos like this. You can also check out our other videos on cryptocurrencies and the overall digital asset space and drop your comments and observations in the comments section below. Everything you do helps with the YouTube algorithm and immensely contributes to the channel's growth. Thanks and enjoy the video.

[00:01:41]>> Well, it's currently the 13F fighting season or it's finishing. Is there um anyone that's caught your attention or even when you speak to the banks, asset managers, hedge funds, what are their concerns about not even just stretch about Bitcoin or is we pass that point of Bitcoin and where are we now? The investors in Bitcoin, it's like we've it's a there's a global consensus Bitcoin is real. um the head the the the tailwinds for Bitcoin or the catalyst will be, you know, uh a sessation or a resolution to the Gulf War, the the the [music] installment of WARSH at the Fed, any any loosening or any forward accommodation in the interest rate monetary policy, and then um and then any um positive developments in in trade, right? And those are all of those are positive catalysts. And then the the passage of resolution on the Clarity Act, right? When we get a resolution there, those will be positive macro factors for Bitcoin for um for the equity. Well, I mean, our equity rally from 120 to $180 in April as we were selling 3.2 billion of stretch. I think that that the MNOM's been expanding. At some point, people start to look at the at the yield and say, "Well, if the company can generate 10% yield a year, it's going to double its Bitcoin per share every seven years.

[00:03:18]If it goes 20% yield, it's going to double Bitcoin per share in three years, right? Um, if that's the case, you could justify putting a multiple, whether it's a PD multiple of three or five or 10 or 20, but at some point you put a multiple upon the yield. If you put a 10x multiple and a 10% yield, you can imagine a trading MNAV of two. And so, I think that the equity investors are getting more excited because they see the credit engine is going to drive uh Bitcoin gains for them. And I think on the credit side, the credit is uh is really in hyperrowth mode for the past 3 months. But you know like pick any hyperrowth business like the first three months of Apple, how do you forecast of the iPhone? How do you forecast the first three months of the iPhone? owner.

[00:04:04]How do you forecast the first 3 months of any revolutionary product when they when they start selling robots that do all your work for you >> and they sell 20 million in the first 3 months that you're like, well, what's the business look like? It's going to be hard. You're going to need a couple of years or at least, you know, a bit more time to figure out where that is. But I think the reaction of anybody that hears about stretch is, "Wow, this seems too good to be true."

[00:04:34]You know, on paper, it's the best credit instrument in the world. In fact, on paper, it's the best publicly traded security in the world. Stretches the highest sharp ratio of any asset, any credit instrument, any hedge fund strategy that's illquid, and any equity.

[00:04:50]And so, you know, your reaction is, well, you know, it looks good. It's just has been doing this for 3 months.

[00:04:57]Come back to measure it for three years.

[00:05:00]Some people will want want to see three years of performance. Some people want to see 10 years of performance like like you know someone there are people that wait 10 years after Tesla worked before they' buy electric car right so how about airlines some people waited 10 years after the airline started to operate before they're flying an airplane [music] so you'll have early adopters you'll have the people that'll do it in the fir they want to be booked on the first Concord flight you'll have people that are going to wait three years and people are going to wait 10 years and I I think um our job right now is manage the instruments uh be rational, communicate, educate and then uh let nature take its toll or you know let nature unra unfurl itself because there just a lot of natural viral dynamics here and and each month by month the thing will season and then people will get more comfortable.

[00:05:59]It's like right now the fear and the anxiety is well if it's hyper growing does that mean you're going to sell 10 billion next month and 20 billion the next month and 50 billion the next >> and if you do that you're like well what if Bitcoin doesn't trade up and what if you hyper sell this and if the equity doesn't trade up you know you can >> construct all these scenarios where you worry yourself to death >> because you extrapolate the one thing but you don't extrapolate all the other systemic we related things and generally in the real world this has a way of moderating itself. There are natural servo mechanisms or natural feedback loops. If if Bitcoin rallies the credit risk falls, the credit will sell. But if Bitcoin falls, we won't sell as much credit. The Bitcoin doesn't keep up with the credit. The demand for the credit will fall. And so I think that generally the market is going to work all this out and it'll establish a dynamic equilibrium which is good for the capital investors, the credit investors and the equity investors. And most people they just want they they want to see performance over a longer period of time. It's like the Nicholas Tab has the Lindy effect.

[00:07:16]>> Yeah. as it gets more lendy, as it just has a longer lifespan and has been performing longer, the risk starts to fall off.

[00:07:25]>> The falls, >> the ball falls off, the support increases. I >> I think it even shows that in Q1 of this year, we had a what a 50% draw down. Uh obviously, it started from October, but I think it was like your second or third best quarter. you bought 32 34,000 [music] Bitcoin in one week a couple of weeks ago, which was your third biggest purchase in in a week. [music] Um, so it's quite incredible to see when you do compare four years prior to like 2022 where you [music] made what, five, six purchases of 10,000 Bitcoin. I think that's the the the growth or the barometer you should be doing like bare market to bare market or like monitoring your position over like a 200E moving average. Like that's how as a as a shareholder you'd look on on the improvements.

[00:08:11]>> We have evolved through about 15 iterations of of capital markets activity over the last 5 years and we've lived through you know it's like four bare markets where we had big draw downs. I think in a bull market in a bull market the equity runs and it's a fairly easy business. It's you know in a bull market it's easy for everybody.

[00:08:33]everything works and uh you know we had a bull market like uh you know after the November elections in 24 and we sold $21 billion of equity at something like an MAB of >> a 50% dilution or something >> but that I mean we we basically sold $21 billion of equity and created a $14 billion Bitcoin gain in a matter of weeks. It was >> it was a go- go time. And [music] so on a in a bare market, we've been in a bare market for about 6 7 months. There the credit, you know, is the idea. But but what we found is bonds wouldn't work in a bare market. STRC, digital credit, if properly managed, does work in a bare market. And so we've been able to use STRC in order to drive Bitcoin yield and and Bitcoin [music] acquisition in the bare market. Now, we've never had and by the way, so we invented our way to drag oursel out of a bare market, right? STRC was like the 14th thing we invented. H after we done, you know, they say Americans do the right thing after they done everything else, right? After we done 14 other things, we finally found Stretch and Stretch started working and just in the past 3 months, it's working pretty well. But we have not we have not ever had a bull market where we had the equity uh engine firing and we also had the credit engine firing and we and we had all the open market activities working. And so I think that the best is yet to come. We're looking forward to that bare mark that bull market where we'll be able to to actively use all these tools. and and and the the other observation we got four other press strike stride strife stream those are really bull market type things and if a bull market comes they actually should become interesting programs for us >> one of the biggest criticisms of strategy is that the company appears to buy Bitcoin near market tops directly addresses that criticism and his explanation is fascinating he says critics fail to understand how the purchase urches are happening. Strategy is often not simply buying Bitcoin with idle cash. Instead, they are swapping equity at moments when their stock premium is strongest. That means when Bitcoin rallies, strategy stock often rallies even harder. The premium expands and the company can issue equity more efficiently. In Sailor's view, these transactions are designed to increase shareholder value while maintaining long-term Bitcoin exposure. He emphasizes repeatedly the company is not trying to trade Bitcoin. They are trying to systematically increase Bitcoin ownership per share. That distinction is critical to understanding the strategy >> in terms of leading up to the earnings call and then knowing that I think anyone that's been observing the stock that selling Bitcoin is something that probably could have happened would have happened eventually. But announcing [music] it, were you surprised how well one, Bitcoin's held up, and two, the the common stocks held up?

[00:11:41]>> I didn't expect Bitcoin to, you know, the price of Bitcoin to change at all on that announcement. Uh, you know, the truth is, if we were to fund all of our dividends exclusively by selling Bitcoin over the next year, we would buy 21 Bitcoin for every one Bitcoin we sold.

[00:12:02]And so it's no different than sell than buying 20 Bitcoin and selling no Bitcoin, buying 21 Bitcoin and selling one Bitcoin. So it's kind of a big nothing burger from an economic point of view. And then from a market point of view, the Bitcoin the Bitcoin market has somewhere between 20 and 50 billion dollars of liquidity a day. And if we were to um you know if we were to fund all of our dividends with [music] Bitcoin, you would be talking about three million. It would be divide three into 50, you know, into 50,000, right? If you can do the math in your head of what is 350,000th of the market, it's not, you know, measurable. It's immeasurable. So, it's really inconsequential. You know, the whole reason we're confident about Bitcoin is because it's a global market. We've we have uh announced we're going to buy 42 billion of Bitcoin. The market goes nowhere. We have literally bought 200 million an hour. The market does not the price does not move up. We have stopped buying. we have bought 200 million an hour for four hours and turn it off and the price trades up you know and and so the truth is the market has its own dynamic and we [music] are a part of it but we're definitely not uh driving the price it's really more driven by macroeconomics I think so just leading on to my like a next question is so the criticism is your company say buys the weekly [music] high um could you tell us like a step by step on how you issue or sell the common or sell the uh preferred. How do you buy the Bitcoin via OTC or >> that's an ignorant criticism that trends on X, but the people that observe it really aren't deep thinkers nor do they analyze things. What's going on here is when we're buying Bitcoin with an equity swap, it's because the equity rallied and there's a massive equity premium.

[00:14:14]And the if if you actually thought about it, you would realize that when Bitcoin surges, the equity surges and the premium expands and it actually becomes more profitable for us to to and we're not buying, we're swapping.

[00:14:30]We're swapping a share of MSTR for a share of BTC when the premium expands and that's when the Bitcoin rallies. So in a week of 168 hours, there might be three hours that week during which the markets rallied and we might raise we might do $250 million of swaps in the three hours. So yes, we're picking the top of the Bitcoin market, but we're also picking the top of the equity capital market [music] and swapping the two of them, and we're we're actually generating a much larger gain. So we're we uh we're making money for our shareholders risk-free by doing these swaps. [music] If we wanted uh to do those swaps when the price is low, when the price is low, the premium is low. The truth is it it makes much less money or we would lose money for the common by swapping the equity when the Bitcoin price is low. So that's why it sort of appears that we might be buying the top, but we're not buying it with money that's been sitting around.

[00:15:40]We're b we're swapping equity at a premium which is exploding when we're doing it. And so we do that because it's equity positive. When the equity premium is compressing and our equity is underperforming, we exit the market to support the equity because the last thing in the world you would want to do is sell equity when your equity is underperforming the Bitcoin. Now, the stretch dynamic is different.

[00:16:09]uh when STRC hits par and is trading at 100 um we are selling STRC and we are buying Bitcoin and we're hedging that [music] in the hour. So if someone actually buys $100 million of Stretch at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, we're buying $100 million of Bitcoin at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. And you'll see when our purchases are [music] are based upon selling the credit, probably the price we get is the is the price in the market at the time we're selling the credit because we want to always stay hedged. And when [music] the purchases are based on equity sales, we're probably getting the price of Bitcoin when the equity premium in our stock was the highest.

[00:16:56]And generally generally our view is we want to always stay long exposed Bitcoin. We don't really trade the market. I if we have a certain amount of Bitcoin per share, if we're doing anything, we're increasing Bitcoin per share. So what we wouldn't do, for example, is we're not really enthusiastic about uh selling a billion dollars of equity, not buying the Bitcoin, and then waiting to see if we get a better price. Because if we were to do that, it creates opacity and uncertainty and that's really not good for the derivatives traders that make a living trading our stock. It's not good for our equity investors.

[00:17:35]Um we we are in business uh because people trust us and and we are transparent and uh that's why we have the the largest spot liquidity for an equity.

[00:17:49]MSTR trades more than I bit and that's why we have the largest open interest in the options market. It It's because everybody knows we're going to stay directionally long. If we start to act random or we start to act like a retail trader who gets up every day and thinks, well, you know, maybe I'll do this, maybe I won't. Well, that's a rational thing for a retail trader or an individual trader, but it's actually irrational for a public company. We are creating securities that 10 million other people are trading or 10,000 other traders are trading. Our job >> is is to be consistent and [music] transparent and predictable to make their job easy. And if we start to be >> not consistent, >> not consistent, we make their life hell.

[00:18:41]>> And so if the company were to uh do something that was opposite of what they expected, that's like a rug pull, they would take all their money and go home and say, "Well, we're just not going to trade this anymore because we can't we don't know what the company's going to do." So we have earnings calls like this. We're communicating to all those investors, the bond holders, the credit holders, the equity holders, the derivative, the call options, the put options. We're communicating to every everybody. This is what we expect to do.

[00:19:12][music] Now, you can create your trading strategy. And there's no greater compliment, by the way, than someone that says, "Oh, I took a billion dollar short position because I trusted you not, you know, not to unwind yours, right?" or I took a bill. They're betting a billion dollars. The day of our earnings call, the largest options trade in the entire US stock market was an MSTR call option trade placed by a derivatives trader like more than anybody. And so that is uh that's a a burden of trust we carry. And so we try not to be traders. We're not being cute.

[00:19:53]We're not dancing around um when when we're swapping credit and equity instruments. We're doing it algorithmically so that like like I don't want to go to bed short where I'm like, "Oh, I'm a billion dollar short and Bitcoin rallies $8,000 and oh, now I got to buy at $8,000 higher."

[00:20:12]>> Yeah.

[00:20:13]>> Right. It's like that's not the business we're in. You know, we're not traders.

[00:20:18]We don't take that kind of risk. We're very methodic in the way we operate our capital markets programs.

[00:20:25]>> So what's the big takeaway from all of this? Michael Sailor believes Bitcoin is no longer an experiment. He believes the market has already crossed a major psychological threshold where institutions now recognize Bitcoin as a legitimate global asset. And Strategy's goal is simple. Accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible while building financial systems designed to compound shareholder exposure over time. Will it work long term? That's the trillion dollar question. But Sailor's conviction remains stronger than ever. He sees Bitcoin not as a short-term trade, Buddhist, the monetary foundation of the digital future. And if that thesis proves correct, we may still be in the very early chapters of one of the biggest financial transformations in modern history.