Michael J. Saylor is the Co-founder, former CEO, and present Chairman of Microstrategy, a leading business intelligence company.
He is currently one of the most influential figures in the tech industry, whose company made news a week ago outperforming Bitcoin with a 12-month return of 600%, three times the percentage return of Bitcoin. Intrigued?
Read along to learn more interesting facts about him.
Michael Saylor – Early Life and Education
Saylor was born on 4 February 1965, in Lincoln, Nebraska. He earned his degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he got admission on an Air Force ROTC scholarship since his father worked in the Air Force.
He graduated in 1987 with a double major but couldn’t become a pilot as he wanted to be, due to a medical condition.
In 1987, he joined The Federal Group, a consulting firm, where he got exposure to computer simulation modeling.
A year later, he left the company and joined DuPont. At DuPont, he helped the company forecast changes in its major markets by developing computer models, with which they were able to predict a recession that would occur three years later in many of the company’s key markets.
Microstrategy
Saylor met Sanju Bhansal, the Co-founder of Microstrategy, at MIT. They co-founded the company in 1989 and initially focused on data mining, which later turned its focus to business intelligence and started developing software to provide intelligent solutions to their clients’ business problems, based on data analytics.
Three years later, Microstrategy won a $10 million contract with McDonald’s to help them strategize efficient promotions using analytics tools.
This was his inspiration to turn to business intelligence where they would create tools to help businesses analyze their data and get better insights to make future predictions.
Michael Saylor, being a visionary, took advantage of the late 1990s dot com bubble when the stock equity valuation of internet-based companies grew exponentially.
He took the company public in 1998. The stock price started at $7 and rose to $333 in a year, and by the early 2000s, Saylor’s net worth touched $7 billion.
Soon after this glorious moment, the SEC filed charges against Saylor for accounting fraud. Although he was able to settle with the SEC, this took the stock price as well as his net worth to a new low as they suffered a huge loss.
He was able to save the company and himself with his timely investment in Bitcoin, which restored his billionaire status years later.
He continued in the CEO position for 33 years until August 2022, when he was appointed as the Executive Chairman of the Company.
Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin prediction
Saylor was optimistic about the Bitcoin price prediction and future from the very beginning. He predicted that Bitcoin would replace gold in the future as the global store-of-value asset, and described the token as the apex property of the human race.
In 2020, amidst the pandemic, Microstrategy spent $250 million to purchase 21,454 Bitcoin. The same year, the company added $225 million worth of tokens to its holding in two batches and announced its decision to take the holdings up to $1 billion.
They crossed the mark a few days later and revealed that they owned coins worth $1.125 billion, and two months later, it grew up to $2.171 billion.
Michael Saylor Bitcoin holdings
Apart from purchasing the coins for the company, Saylor himself had bought 17,732 coins worth $175 million.
His move to step down as the CEO was meant to focus more on Bitcoin, which he calculated would be easier as the Executive Chairman. This is the strategy that brought the company’s net worth to $25.84 in March 2024, a 736.03% growth in market capitalization in a year.
Michael Saylor is not only a tech-wiz and an entrepreneur, but also a New York Times and The Wall Street Journal featured author who wrote the bestseller Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything.
He is also an investor in various entrepreneurship and an inventor with about 50 patents. His journey had its fair share of ups and downs, yet his resilience and determination propelled him forward, toward success.
