Published: March 19th, 2025
After a brief pause, Michael Saylor's Strategy has resumed its Bitcoin buying spree. The business intelligence firm has acquired another USD 10.7 million in Bitcoin, adding 130 BTC to its already impressive hoard, raising the total to almost half a million.
The buy, made at an average price of USD 82,979 per coin, is actually on the small side for the firm formerly called MicroStrategy; one of the smallest, in fact, since it first began buying BTC in 2020.
According to the firm's SEC filing, the latest acquisition brings Strategy's total Bitcoin holdings to 499,225 BTC or approximately USD $41.3 billion. That's roughly 2.4% of the total Bitcoin supply.
The acquisition was funded with proceeds from the company's STRK ATM program, which aims to raise USD 21 billion in new capital for crypto-related investments.
ATM in this case refers to At-The-Market, a mechanism which allows a company to sell shares directly via secondary markets rather than undertaking a traditional public offering. Prevailing market prices determine the value of the shares being sold.
The corporate Bitcoin whale has a three-year plan to raise $42 billion and significantly expand its Bitcoin holdings. Steady BTC acquisitions are core to the company's long-term business strategy, even in the face of crypto market volatility.
Bitcoin's price rose slightly following the announcement, but then fell back by 0.3 per cent. At time of writing, data from CoinGecko listed the price of one BTC at $83,112.58.
Even with the BTC price fluctuations seen in recent weeks, Strategy's Bitcoin yield stands at 6.9 per cent for year-to-date. By year's end the firm hopes to achieve a yield target of 15 per cent.
On February 24, 2025, Strategy purchased 20,365 BTC for close to USD 2 billion. In early November 2024 it started making new Bitcoin buys on a weekly basis.
Back in February 2021, BTC pushed past the USD 50,000 mark on the back of an announcement by MicroStrategy that it had invested another USD 600 million in BTC.
The company said it planned to sell an equivalent amount of convertible notes to institutional investors and use the proceeds to buy-up more Bitcoin. That would add significantly to the 71,080 BTC it already holds, currently valued at around USD 3.5 billion.
MicroStrategy added that it would also give investors the option to buy an additional USD 90 million in convertible notes, which could be used to purchase more Bitcoin.
Since crossing the USD 42,000 line in mid-January 2021, Bitcoin had spent weeks floating back and forth between USD 30,000 and 40,000, prompting market watchers to wonder whether or not BTC had sufficient momentum to keep going higher.
On the eighth of February, electric car manufacturer Tesla said it had invested USD 1.5 billion in Bitcoin, giving the cryptocurrency the boost it needed to go above USD 42 and beyond. This week it started breaking records again.
Analysts said the Tesla announcement prompted the price rally. Many people inside the crypto industry and beyond anticipated the move was coming. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had been tweeting positively for months about Bitcoin and touting its potential merits.
Since the company took its USD 1.5 billion stake in BTC, the cryptocurrency's price has moved rapidly from USD 38,800 to move past USD 50,000, a 30 per cent increase overall.
Taken together, investors are treating the MicroStrategy and Tesla moves as a vote of confidence by big, publicly-traded companies and traditional financial institutions in Bitcoin. That's making BTC more attractive to a wider stable of investors as an asset.
Tesla's impact on Bitcoin's price began well before the company made its purchase public. CEO Musk has been helping drive the price of Bitcoin up for at least a month.
At the end of January, Musk kicked-off a new Twitter trend when he added the word ‘Bitcoin’ to his account bio. Many of the Tesla CEO's 47 million social media followers quickly did the same.
It was a very modern kind of celebrity endorsement, with viral YouTubers and professional athletes following Musk's example. They updated and shared their new Bitcoin Twitter bios with a massive audience of followers.
But he hadn't finished. The same day he tweeted, cryptically, that... ‘In retrospect, it was inevitable,’ possibly a reference to his bio – or something else? The resulting social media furore compelled managers at crypto exchange Binance to add extra capacity to deal with the spike in BTC demand.
A study conducted by Blockchain Research Lab suggests that Musk's BTC-related tweeting drove a significant (and abnormal) rally for Bitcoin that saw its price peak by 20 per cent in under eight hours.
A few days following the celeb-fuelled pump of Bitcoin's price, Tesla's high-profile USD 1.5 billion buy hit the news. There was the investment announcement itself — coming a few days after a MicroStrategy press conference where it's CEO encouraged companies to get into Bitcoin. Then there was the follow-on news that Tesla planned to start taking Bitcoin payment for its cars and related products.
That generated a lot of buzz, but in reality, big companies had been moving into BTC for some time. They just did it without press and social media fanfare.
A number of institutional investors had been quietly increasing its Bitcoin holdings for months.
MicroStrategy made a series of buys amounting to USD 425 million between August and September last year. CEO Michael Saylor was widely praised in crypto circles for blazing a new trail and helping legitimize Bitcoin investment.
The MicroStrategy's move was followed by a USD 50 million Bitcoin purchase by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's Square in October. At the time, this represented a full one per cent of the business's total assets.
With Bitcoin finally garnering large institutional investments, praise for the digital currency began to roll in from some of traditional finance's big beasts.
