🚨 Saylor told the world when he will sell Bitcoin

For six years, Michael Saylor has been telling the world that he will never sell Bitcoin. He told the ABC on Tuesday night he probably will.

That was not a slip. That was not a quote that was taken out of context. That was the most straightforward statement made on Strategy's Q1 earnings call and within minutes, the stock reacted.

"We might sell a little bit of bitcoin to pay a dividend just to immunize the market and declare victory."

MSTR fell more than 4% after hours. Earlier in the session, Bitcoin was comfortable above $81,500 after breaking it earlier but promptly slipped below $81,000 just one hour after these comments landed. Many in the audience behind the scenes saw a secondary development out of price move. The news was the same sentence itself.

How we got here

Strategy has 818,334 BTC with an average acquisition cost of $75,537 per coin currently valued at about $66 billion. The company saw a has recorded a net loss of $12.54 billion for Q1, its third consecutive miss, as most of that (down to a mere $14.46B unrealized hit following Bitcoin crashing more than 23% during the quarter).

That made it the worst first quarter for Bitcoin since 2018.

The real pressure is not the paper loss of goods. Note that annual liabilities of $1.5 billion are hidden in the balance sheet and includes preferred stock dividends and debt interest. Strategy now has ~USD 18m worth of reserves to cover those payments at the current run-rate until about October 2023. That is not a crisis. But it is a clock.

On the call, Saylor walked through his thinking. You sell $1M worth of preferred stock, with the proceeds you purchase Bitcoin, then you sell a small amount of Bitcoin (eg. BTC and/or OPS) to cover the dividend (ie.< 10% of your stake) as well end up in more BTC than where started! CEO Phong Le was even more blunt: "We are going to sell bitcoin when it is in our best interest. We're not going to just sit there and say we're never selling the bitcoin.

But the size of what they are describing is not overdramatic. For a current trim of this position 1% is about 8,000 BTC value $650 million. Bitcoin absorbs this kind of volume in a day without breaking a sweat. More recently, the ETF market has experienced days with multiples of that in net inflows.

Why bore the market in October 2023.

The never-sell promise has always been more about the people than the math. It was about the identity.

The investment case for Strategy was built entirely on one irrevocable pledge. Institutions forced into MSTR at all due to the Bitcoin position being permanent. Retail investors piled in as Saylor's conviction appeared unquestionable. The fact of that commitment was such that the stock traded at a premium to its underlying Bitcoin holdings for years.

The commitment was not given up at the end of Tuesday's call. It put conditions on it. And conditional conviction is a very different thing from unconditional conviction, no matter how small the actual sale.

Strategy last sold Bitcoin 704 BTC in December 2022 at the bottom of what some are calling the worst crypto bear market in history. For the three years that followed, Saylor repeated the never-sell message at every opportunity. That asterisk which arrived on Tuesday is minimal in dollar terms yet massive in symbolic terms.

Peter Schiff tweeted right away: Saylor is finally coming to terms with what I've been saying all along.

Regardless of whether you agree with Schiff or not, the owners of MSTR that bought it by saying this would never happen now have decide how to handle that intel?

Still, it makes for the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury on Earth. At today's prices the model continues to work. But what happened on Tuesday night in a single sentence rewrote the story Strategy had been telling the market since 2020.

Intel (INTC) is back in Wall Street’s face after a brutal rally that pushed the stock above 17% in one day. Shares gained 13% on Tuesday and reached a record $110 before another 4.76% jump after regular trading ended.

Coinbase just laid off 700 people and blamed it on AI. By comparison, its nearest rival said the use of AI increased by 1,000% over four months.

This week, CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed the layoff of 14% of its headcount, while also directly blaming AI research which has allowed non-engineering teams to automate work previously reliant on a full-time dedicated employee able to code.

On the same day, eToro CEO Yoni Assia said early embrace of AI spared his company a similar moment. He pointed to Cursor, Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini and Microsoft Copilot as company-wide tools now plugged into operations at eToro and said in four months, internal usage of AI at the firm jumped by more than 1,000%.

He said that 40 new apps were completely built, tested, and deployed entirely by AI, with one individual guiding each from concept to deployment. The stories of Coinbase and eToro the same story expressed two different ways. One firm said it reorganized after the fact.

One restructured before being forced. Both ended up in the same place: smaller teams, more automated output and quicker product cycles.

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