MicroStrategy execs dump $175M stock after 8-year hiatus, thanks Bitcoin!
MicroStrategy execs dumped almost $175 million in company stock in the past year, while the Bitcoin-hoarding data firm’s share price surged 400%.
All that stock was sold by eight MicroStrategy insiders. They were led by chief financial officer Phong Le and chief technology officer Timothy Lang.
Those two cashed in $55.8 million and $44.9 million respectively. That accounts for nearly 60% of all MicroStrategy stock sold by the company’s executives since this time last year.
MicroStrategy’s leader — the yacht-loving, jet-wielding Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor — hasn’t directly offloaded any, despite retaining nearly a quarter of all company stock (over 2.3 million shares).
Disclosures collated by financials screener OpenInsider indicate Saylor hasn’t directly sold any MicroStrategy stock since September 2012. Back then, he dumped $13.6 million in shares for about $126 a piece.
Although, Saylor did file to shift 50,000 shares to one of his other firms, Alcantara LLC, earlier this year.
MicroStrategy stock is still 80% Bitcoin
In any case, MicroStrategy stock is now worth over $720, thanks to Saylor’s infamous Bitcoin strategy.
That strategy consists entirely of acquiring and holding as much BTC as possible. Saylor has sold billions in corporate bonds to fund his crypto lust, which he first revealed in mid-2020.
MicroStrategy currently holds 108,991 BTC, worth about $5.52 billion at press time.
The Virginia-bound company’s Bitcoin stash is the largest corporate treasury on record, followed by Elon Musk’s Tesla, which owns 43,200 BTC ($2.19 billion), per its latest SEC filings.
In fact, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin makes up a truly significant chunk of the company’s market value.
The NASDAQ-listed stock is worth a tad over $7 billion today — which means MicroStrategy is actually 80% Bitcoin.
An 8-year hiatus on stock sales
Protos mapped 10 years worth of stock sales at the hands of MicroStrategy execs on the chart below, as reported by OpenInsider.
In total, Protos calculated MicroStrategy execs dumped just under $270 million worth of company stock in the past 10 years.
Those same insiders only sold roughly $8.3 million in shares between October 2012 and October 2020. Nearly 65% of all reported executive sales occurred in the past year.
Read more: [How Bitcoin impacted Tesla, MicroStrategy, and Square’s Q2 earnings]
Indeed, MicroStrategy insiders generally refrained from selling their shares for the eight years between the end of 2012 and 2020 — when MSTR’s share price began to surge along with Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy execs (namely directors Carl Rickertsen and Leslie Rechan) have purchased only $800,000 worth of company shares in the past 10 years, according to OpenInsider.
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