Michael Saylor, the billionaire bitcoin investor whose turned his company, MicroStrategy, into a high-risk proxy for the cryptocurrency, has been encouraging Microsoft to use some of its massive cash pile to follow his lead.
But shareholders on Tuesday said no.
In October, Microsoft told investors that the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, intended to submit a shareholder proposal recommending that the software company’s board look at diversifying its balance sheet with bitcoin.
Saylor, who has seen his company’s stock price soar almost 500% this year as it buys billions of dollars worth of bitcoin, presented the proposal at Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting.
“Microsoft can’t afford to miss the next technology wave, and bitcoin is that wave” Saylor said in a video presentation, which he released on X last week. The post received over 3 million views.
In his three-minute presentation, Saylor displayed a chart showing that bitcoin generated annual returns of 62% between August 2020 and November 2024, compared with 18% for Microsoft and 14% for the S&P 500. Bonds as an asset class have lost 5%, the presentation says.
“You can convert your cash flows and your dividends and your buybacks and your debt into Bitcoin,” Saylor said. “If you do that, you’ll add hundreds of dollars to the stock price.”
The virtual appearance on Tuesday wasn’t the first time Saylor has made the pitch to Microsoft, which was sitting on $78.4 billion wroth of cash, equivalents and short-term investments, as of the end of the September.
Microsoft said in its proxy filing in October that its treasury and investment services team previously evaluated bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fund the company’s operations and reduce economic risk, and “continues to monitor trends and developments related to cryptocurrencies to inform future decision making.”
“Hey @SatyaNadella, if you want to make the next trillion dollars for $MSFT shareholders, call me,” Saylor wrote.
The proposal failed to garner support from a majority of voting shareholders, after Microsoft recommended they reject it. Proxy advisors Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services both suggested a no vote, too.
Microsoft shares have gained about 19% so far this year, far underperforming MicroStrategy.
But Saylor has tied his company, now valued at about $83 billion, directly to the fortunes of bitcoin. In mid-2020, the company, which had been a middling software business, announced its plan to invest in bitcoin, disclosing in an earnings call that it would commit $250 million over the next 12 months to “one or more alternative assets,” which could include digital currencies such as bitcoin. At the time, MicroStrategy’s market cap was about $1.1 billion.
As of Nov. 10, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries owned a total of about 279,420 bitcoins, acquired at an aggregate price of roughly $11.9 billion. With bitcoin trading at $95,000, those holdings are worth over $26.5 billion.
MicroStrategy has selling stock and raising debt to help fund its bitcoin purchased. The company said on Nov. 21, that it had completed a $3 billion convertible debt sale “to acquire additional bitcoin and for general corporate purposes.”
Saylor’s net worth has ballooned to $9.1 billion, according to Forbes, primarily due to his MicroStrategy ownership.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.
Courtesy: AMD
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.
The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries.
Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”
“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note.
Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.
The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.