MicroStrategy chairman Michael Saylor pushed back on critics who call corporate Bitcoin holdings reckless, telling a podcast that buying BTC is fundamentally an allocation decision—not a moral failing. With few attractive places to park large cash balances, Saylor argued, Bitcoin is a legitimate option for companies that can tolerate significant price swings. Public companies now hold roughly 1.1 million BTC, about 5.5% of the 19.97 million coins currently in circulation, according to public disclosures compiled by BitcoinTreasuries. MicroStrategy is far and away the largest public holder, with 687,410 BTC, a concentration that helps explain why markets and regulators take notice whenever corporate purchases scale up. Saylor framed the choice as an accounting and capital-allocation tradeoff. Short-term Treasury yields are negligible and share buybacks carry their own risks—especially for firms with deteriorating results. He illustrated the calculus with a simple example: a company losing $10 million a year could still net a gain if its Bitcoin position rose by $30 million over the same period. That’s the kind of upside that motivates some executives to add BTC to the balance sheet. But the case isn’t risk-free. Bitcoin’s price can fall sharply, and companies with heavy leverage or thin operating margins may be forced to liquidate at inopportune moments. MicroStrategy’s scale and long-term stance make its situation different from smaller firms that don’t have the same runway or investor tolerance for volatility. Investors and analysts remain split: large corporate Bitcoin allocations are either evidence of conviction or a source of concentration risk that adds volatility to returns. As corporate holdings climb into the hundreds of thousands of coins, Bitcoin exposure stops being a niche treasury move and becomes a core element of how markets evaluate a firm’s financial profile. At the time of writing, Bitcoin traded around $95,250, with an intraday range near $94,320–$95,660 on major exchanges—levels that can quickly tilt the perception of recent buyers toward savvy timing or poor judgment, depending on short-term price moves. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
