Nasdaq-listed company Microstrategy recently bought almost 17K bitcoins within 74 hours, costing about $175 million. The CEO of this billion-dollar company used to be a bitcoin skeptic but has recently become a bitcoin bull when his company purchased $425 million worth of bitcoin.
Billion Dollar Public Company Dives Into Bitcoin
Microstrategy recently made history in the bitcoin space when it became the first publicly-traded company to spend a material amount of its reserves to buy bitcoin.
The company has purchased a total of 38,250 BTC at an aggregate price of $425 million. The first purchase was announced on Aug. 11 for 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate price of $250 million. The company then disclosed on Sept. 14 that it had purchased an additional 16,796 bitcoins at an aggregate price of $175 million.
Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor explained on Friday:
To acquire 16,796 BTC (disclosed 9/14/20), we traded continuously 74 hours, executing 88,617 trades ~0.19 BTC each 3 seconds. ~$39,414 in BTC per minute, but at all times we were ready to purchase $30-50 million in a few seconds if we got lucky with a 1-2% downward spike.
Saylor was previously a bitcoin skeptic, however. He tweeted on Dec. 18, 2013: “Bitcoin days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling.”
During a podcast interview with Morgan Creek Digital partner Anthony Pompliano, published Wednesday, Saylor admitted that he had forgotten about the tweet. “I really am ashamed to say I didn’t know I tweeted it until the day that I tweeted that I bought $250 million worth of bitcoin and then I discovered the hive mind crypto twitter consciousness
