Michael Saylor: the tech mystic who bet it all on bitcoin

Michael Saylor, the founder of data analytics company MicroStrategy, has pursued the odd strategy of placing the whole firm on red at the roulette table that is bitcoin. Where will the ball finally land?

Michael Saylor
Opinion is firmly split on MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor.
(Image credit: © Getty)

When cryptocurrency prices were plummeting in June, sending billions of dollars up in smoke, one of bitcoin’s noisiest evangelists vowed he would “continue to HODL” – hold on for dear life – “through adversity”. A noble sentiment, perhaps. But arguably Michael Saylor had little choice.

Having strapped his data analytics company MicroStrategy – founded in 1989, and his lifetime’s work – to an “all-or-nothing” bet on bitcoin, his only recourse was to continue bigging up the currency. Saylor is so convinced he can turn his investment into a “bonanza” that MicroStrategy is ploughing “almost every cent it can find into bitcoin”, reported The Information in February this year, when the price had already halved from its $68,000 November peak.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.