Speaker

Michael Saylor

Michael Saylor

American entrepreneur and Executive Chairman of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the enterprise software company he co-founded in 1989 and turned, from 2020, into the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world. MIT-trained in aeronautical engineering and the history of science, and the most prominent corporate advocate for Bitcoin as a long-term treasury asset.

Saylor built MicroStrategy into a business-intelligence software firm through the 1990s and 2000s. In August 2020 he committed the company’s cash reserves to Bitcoin, arguing that holding cash and short-term bonds exposed the company to certain currency debasement — a decision that reoriented MicroStrategy’s balance sheet and, later, its capital-raising strategy (debt and equity issuance to buy more Bitcoin) around a single asset. He also founded Saylor Academy, a non-profit offering free online education, and has written on technology’s civilisational impact (The Mobile Wave, 2012).

Core positions

Saylor argues from an engineer’s frame rather than an economist’s: money is ‘economic energy’, official inflation measures (CPI) radically understate true currency debasement because they exclude asset prices and rely on a revisable ‘market basket’, and Bitcoin is the first successful engineering solution — a piece of ‘digital property’, a non-sovereign bearer instrument that no government or company can dilute or easily confiscate. He draws a sharp ethical and legal line between property (uncontrolled assets like Bitcoin, gold, oil) and securities (company stock, most other crypto tokens, which he holds to a stricter promotional-disclosure standard) — a line that underpins his defence of promoting Bitcoin publicly while never claiming his own company’s stock will ‘go up forever’. His price expectations for Bitcoin are maximalist and largely unfalsified in his own framing (see Digital Property for the case and the required mainstream counterview).

In the wiki