U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen is credited with the famous phrase "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."
The senator from Illinois, who died in 1969, was supposedly complaining about excessive federal spending, and while some dispute that he actually said those words, the line has found a place in history.
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Michael Saylor also knows a thing or two about real money.
The co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy (MSTR) once lost $6 billion in a single day back in 2020, after the business-intelligence company announced accounting mistakes and the stock dropped.
Saylor, who stepped down as MicroStrategy's CEO in 2022, reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that included an $8.3 million personal disgorgement.
He has also been a bitcoin evangelist, and he spoke about the primary digital currency during MicroStrategy's first-quarter-earnings call.
"This quarter," he said, "it's the end of the crypto childhood or the crypto cowboy era, where you had had 15 years of lots of confusion, chaos, and jockeying of thousands and thousands of crypto assets."
"Well, bitcoin is the winner, and it is the one emergent institutional asset that has come out of that 15 years," Saylor said.
Image source: Twitter.
MicroStrategy's co-founder calls bitcoin 'unique'
Investors’ interest in bitcoin soared with January’s introduction of bitcoin exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, particularly the ones offered by BlackRock and Fidelity Investments.
"And so, bitcoin is very unique," Saylor said. "It's the one crypto asset that a publicly traded company can hold on its balance sheet, can capitalize upon."
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Saylor maintained that entire modern institutional asset economy, the options market, the securities market, the money manager system, the institutional mutual funds, the institutional ETFs, are all going to be centered around bitcoin as the digital property going forward.
"And so, while we're at the end of the beginning, you know, we're now, I would say, at the beginning of the middle," he said.
MicroStrategy posted a first-quarter loss of $3.09 per share on April 29, swinging from earnings of $31.79 a year earlier and missing the FactSet analyst consensus calling for a loss of 55 cents a share.
The latest result reflected a $192 million bitcoin impairment charge, "the result of bitcoin price fluctuations throughout this past quarter," the company said. The charge in the year-earlier period was $20 million.
Revenue totaled $115 million, down from $126 million a year earlier and short of FactSet's call for $121.7 million.
Bitcoin was down 3% to $60,864 at last check, while MicroStrategy was tumbling 15.5% to $1,092. The company's executives still pledged their allegiance to crypto.
Andrew Kang, MicroStrategy's chief financial officer, said the company was the world's largest corporate holder of bitcoin, "and we remain committed to our bitcoin acquisition strategy with the utmost conviction, long-term focus, and with a strong risk-managed approach."
CEO: 'we're highly committed to bitcoin strategy'
President and CEO Phong Le told analysts “we remain highly committed to our bitcoin strategy with a long-term focus.”
"This past quarter, the price of bitcoin appreciated significantly, spurred notably by the approval of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded products or ETPs, which has drawn considerable institutional attention," he said.
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He said the company believed that the introduction of spot bitcoin ETPs "further evidences the maturation of bitcoin as an institutional grade asset class with broader regulatory recognition and institutional adoption."
Canaccord lowered its price target on MicroStrategy to $1,590 from $1,810 while affirming a buy rating on the shares.
The investment firm said the company's strategy was again in full swing in the first quarter, given the approvals of U.S.-listed spot bitcoin ETFs.
MicroStrategy raised more than $1.5 billion in the first quarter and used the proceeds to acquire an additional 25,250 bitcoin. It now owns 214,400 BTC valued around $13.6 billion, Canaccord told investors in a research report.
Bitcoin recently marked its fourth halving, where the reward for mining the crypto is split in half. Halvings reduce the rate at which new coins are created, lowering the available amount of new supply.
Canaccord said that with the recent halving event, the amount of new bitcoin mined per day has been reduced by 50%.
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