Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor has made $370 million from MicroStrategy stock sales this year
Michael Saylor, chairman and chief executive officer at MicroStrategy, during an interview at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami Beach, Florida, US, on Thursday, May 18, 2023.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images
MicroStrategy founder and bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor entered into a stock-sale plan with his company last summer that allowed him to unload up to 400,000 shares in the first four months of 2024.
It was a timely agreement for the 59-year-old crypto billionaire.
With the plan more than 90% of the way to completion, Saylor has netted about $370 million from this year’s stock sales, thanks to the stratospheric rise in value of MicroStrategy, which is effectively a bitcoin holding company.
Saylor, who started MicroStrategy in 1989 as a software and tech consulting business and still serves as chairman, has emerged as a bitcoin hero in recent years, telling CNBC last month the cryptocurrency is going to “eat gold.” His company has used its balance sheet and tapped the capital markets to acquire more than 214,000 bitcoins since announcing its strategy to enter the crypto market in mid-2020.
Those assets, equal to about 1% of the total number of bitcoins minted to date, are now worth about $13.6 billion, accounting for the bulk of MicroStrategy’s $21.3 billion market cap. The stock has been a Wall Street darling of late, climbing 91% this year — despite a 37% pullback from its March high — after soaring 346% in 2023, one of the best performers across the U.S. stock market.
Saylor is the largest MicroStrategy shareholder, with Class B holdings worth about $2.3 billion. At the end of 2023, Saylor owned another 400,000 Class A shares due to an option he received in 2014. Those are the shares he’s selling with speed.
Buried near the end of its third-quarter earnings filing on Nov. 1, MicroStrategy announced that the company and Saylor had entered into an agreement, called a 10b5-1 plan, in September, allowing the founder to sell as many as 5,000 shares every trading day from Jan. 2 to April 25 of this year, up to a total of 400,000 shares. The shares were tied to a “vested stock option, which expires if unexercised on April 30, 2024.”
As of this week, Saylor has sold 370,000 shares totaling $372.7 million, according to filings. His Class A holdings are down to 30,000 shares as of the latest sale disclosed on Thursday.
MicroStrategy didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mark Palmer, an analyst at Benchmark, called the stock sales “entirely programmatic” because of the trading plan executed last year and not at all a reflection of Saylor’s confidence in MicroStrategy or his view of the stock price.
There’s a differing view in the retail investor world, however. Numerous posts on Reddit suggest that Saylor is perhaps selling for other reasons, with some members of the r/MSTR subreddit speculating that he’s using the cash to buy bitcoin directly. Some say they’re selling along with Saylor. The stock is down 29% in April, while bitcoin has dropped 11%.
‘Easy enough to find the truth’
Palmer, who has a “buy” rating on the stock, countered that such a point of view “would be a misread” by investors and traders.
“What we’re seeing here is very straightforward and all of it’s been disclosed already,” Palmer said. “It’s easy for those who either may not understand the details or those who understand the details but might have a short on the stock to twist things around a bit. As is typically the case, it’s easy enough to find the truth.”
Even with the stock sales, the majority of Saylor’s wealth remains wrapped up in his Class B holdings of MicroStrategy, along with the 17,732 bitcoins he purchased in 2020 that are currently worth about $1.1 billion.
Much of the rally in bitcoin and related investments has to do with the emergence of bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which received regulatory approval earlier this year, and the upcoming halving this week. The technical event happens every four years, cutting rewards for bitcoin miners in half and reducing the pace at which new bitcoins enter the market.
In a market where consumers can buy bitcoin directly on various exchanges or choose a host of new ETFs, Saylor has said the ongoing advantage of MicroStrategy is that it’s a leveraged bitcoin play without the management fee. The company can raise money to go deeper in crypto, and last month said it reeled in $782 million “to acquire additional bitcoin.” The cash came from a convertible debt sale at 0.625% interest.
“Is there any company in the world that you wouldn’t like to invest in that could borrow $1 billion at less than 1% interest to invest in your best idea?” Saylor said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in March. He added that the company’s leverage leads to volatility, which “attracts capital, and we can then leverage more.”
Benchmark’s Palmer said there are plenty of reasons to remain bullish on MicroStrategy, especially with the halving just around the corner. Following past halving events, the price of bitcoin has jumped.
“If I were in a situation where I had shares in MicroStrategy, this is time where I’d very much want to be holding on to them,” Palmer said.
Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.
The entity is named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, according to a memo sent by Chew and obtained by CNBC. As part of the joint venture, Chew said the company has signed agreements with the three managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. He said that the deal’s “closing date” is Jan. 22.
Under a national security law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January, China-based ByteDance was required to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face an effective ban in the country. In September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed deal that would keep TikTok operational in the U.S. by meeting the requirements of a law originally signed by former President Joe Biden.
Chew noted that the new TikTok joint venture would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.
The TikTok chief said the entity will be responsible for protecting U.S. data, ensuring the security of its prized algorithm, content moderation and “software assurance.” He added that the joint venture will “have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
In addition to being an investor, Oracle will serve as the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing and validating that it complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” the memo said. Sensitive U.S. data will be stored in Oracle’s U.S.-based cloud computing data centers, Chew wrote.
The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.
Chew noted that TikTok global U.S. entities “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.”
Under Trump’s executive order in September, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to “permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed,” allowing the deal to finalize by Jan 23.
WATCH: TikTok signs deal for sale of U.S. unit to joint venture
The VC arms of Google and Nvidia have invested in Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable’s $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Thursday.
The news confirms an earlier story from CNBC, which reported on Tuesday that Lovable had raised at that valuation, trebling its valuation from its previous round in July, and that the investors included U.S. VC firms Accel and Khosla Ventures.
CapitalG, one of Google’s VC divisions, and Menlo Ventures led the round. Alongside Accel and Khosla, Nvidia venture arm NVentures, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s VC firm Kinship Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, T.Capital, Hubspot Ventures, DST Global, EQT Global, Creandum and Evantic also participated.
The fresh funds take Lovable’s total raised in 2025 to over $500 million.
“Lovable has done something rare: built a product that enterprises and founders both love,” said Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG in a statement accompanying the announcement.
“The demand we’re seeing from Fortune 500 companies signals a fundamental shift in how software gets built.”
Lovable’s platform uses AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to help users build apps and websites using text prompts, without technical knowledge of coding.
The startup reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in November, just under a year after achieving $1 million in ARR for the first time. It was founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Vibe coding startups have seen big interest from VCs in recent times, as investors bet on their promise of drastically reducing the time it takes to create software and apps.
In the U.S., Anysphere, which created coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. In September, Replit hit a $3 billion price tag after picking up $250 million and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.
The Micron logo is seen displayed at the 8th China International Import Expo.
Sheldon Cooper | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Micron Technology‘s stock jumped 15% after the company signaled robust demand for its memory chips and blew away fiscal first-quarter estimates.
During an earnings call with analysts, Micron, which makes memory storage used for computers and artificial intelligence servers, said data center needs have fueled greater demand for its products.
Micron said it expects the total addressable market for high-bandwidth memory to hit $100 billion by 2028, growing at a 40% compounded annual growth rate. Management also upped its capital expenditures guidance to $20 billion from $18 billion.
“We are more than sold out,” said business chief Sumit Sadana. “We have a significant amount of unmet demand in our models and this is just consistent with an environment where the demand is substantially higher than supply for the foreseeable future.
Micron topped Wall Street estimates for the fiscal first quarter and issued blowout guidance.
The company reported adjusted earnings of $4.78 per share on $13.64 billion in revenue, surpassing LSEG estimates for earnings of $3.95 per share and $12.84 billion in sales.
Revenues in the current quarter are expected to hit about $18.70 billion, blowing past the $14.20 billion expected by LSEG. Adjusted earnings are forecast to reach $8.42, versus expectations of $4.78 per share.
JPMorgan upped its price target on the stock following the results, citing the favorable pricing setup, while Bank of America upgraded shares to a buy rating.
Morgan Stanley called the results the best revenue and net income upside in the “history of the U.S. semis industry” outside of Nvidia.
“If AI keeps growing as we expect, we believe that the next 12 months are going to have broader coat tails to the AI trade than just the processor names and memory would be the biggest beneficiary,” analysts wrote.
WATCH: Micron shares spike on better-than-expected quarterly results
Micron year-to-date stock chart.
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