On May 6, 2025, during the Q1 earnings conference call, Michael Saylor said: "We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend." MSTR dropped more than 4% in the hours that followed.
Strategy holds 818,334 BTC. Annual obligations between dividends on preferred shares and interest on debt amount to roughly $1.5 billion. The software business generates a handful of millions per quarter. The gap is covered by issuing new shares at a premium to NAV, or - for the first time ever - by selling bitcoin.
Adam Back, a few days before the call, had tweeted that "bitcoin treasury companies are an arbitrage between the fiat present and the hyperbitcoinized future."
In finance, an arbitrage is a risk-free, non-directional trade that exploits price differences for the same asset across different markets. What Strategy is doing is a debt-financed leveraged bet on bitcoin — not arbitrage.
The "BTC per share" mechanism Saylor publishes every quarter works like this: new shareholders pay a premium above the value of the underlying bitcoin. That premium gets redistributed to existing shareholders as "growth." The returns of the old come from the capital of the new.
It all works as long as the line keeps growing. The day it stops, Houston, we'll have a problem.
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Strategy holds 818,334 BTC. Annual obligations between dividends on preferred shares and interest on debt amount to roughly $1.5 billion. The software business generates a handful of millions per quarter. The gap is covered by issuing new shares at a premium to NAV, or - for the first time ever - by selling bitcoin.
Adam Back, a few days before the call, had tweeted that "bitcoin treasury companies are an arbitrage between the fiat present and the hyperbitcoinized future."
In finance, an arbitrage is a risk-free, non-directional trade that exploits price differences for the same asset across different markets. What Strategy is doing is a debt-financed leveraged bet on bitcoin — not arbitrage.
The "BTC per share" mechanism Saylor publishes every quarter works like this: new shareholders pay a premium above the value of the underlying bitcoin. That premium gets redistributed to existing shareholders as "growth." The returns of the old come from the capital of the new.
It all works as long as the line keeps growing. The day it stops, Houston, we'll have a problem.
naddr1qqsx...
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