The largest holder of bitcoin, briefly, was back in the black for the first time since January.
On Tuesday, the price of bitcoin spiked to an intra-day high of $75,900, putting Michael Saylor’s Strategy and its holdings of 780,000 coins back in the money compared to the average purchase price of $75,577.
Saylor, the executive chairman and founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), is arguably the most well-known evangelist for the benefits of the cryptocurrency. Last October Strategy’s market valuation was in excess of two times its holdings in bitcoin and with the price around $125,000 sitting pretty with billions of dollars of unrealized gains on the balance sheet.
A very public dispute with renowned short-seller Jim Chanos about whether Strategy’s premium to its market-to-net-asset-value, or mNAV, was justified preceded that premium eroding completely.
Chanos won that argument hands down, closing his long bitcoin/short Strategy trade for a sizeable gain. At the same time, a major deleveraging of bitcoin was underway, as it suffered outflows into other speculative vehicles like gold and silver, and its price more than halved to around $60,000 in February.
At that stage, Strategy was sitting on unrealized losses of almost $5 billion and despite public displays of bravura and a refusal to contemplate selling, the pressure on Strategy’s stock price was relentless. The shares fell from a July 2025 high of $457 to a February low of just $104.
The shares have since staged a dramatic recovery, rebounding up to $143 in Thursday pre-market trading and now down just 5% on the year.
Explanations for the sell-off in bitcoin are myriad. The advent of quantum computing threatened the security of bitcoin according to Jefferies’s strategist Chris Wood.
Deleveraging was clearly a factor and a crypto-asset theft of $128 million did little to help sentiment. The switch of speculative, retail-driven flows into gold was often suggested as an alternative reason and this was partially vindicated by bitcoin’s recovery during the start of the Iran war as gold struggled to preserve its safe-haven allure.
Throughout the downturn in bitcoin’s fortunes, though, Saylor has continued to accumulate more coins. In the week leading up to April 12, Strategy acquired 13,927 bitcoin at an average price of $71,902 mostly funded by sales of Strategy’s preferred stock that trades like a bond with a yield of 11.5%. Saylor has been anxious to promote the preferred stock, extolling its high-yield/ low volatility returns.
Last week Saylor was in defiant, bullish mode, posting on X that “bitcoin has won.”