The CEO who made an initial $425 million bet on Bitcoin earlier this year (and more since then), Michael Saylor, is offering to advise Elon Musk on how to begin investing in cryptocurrency.
Saylor proposed that Musk convert Tesla’s balance sheet into Bitcoin (BTC), a company whose market capitalization, according to AssetDash, is currently valued at more than $658 billion, according to a tweet posted today.
Saylor then offered to “share [his] playbook” with the Tesla CEO “from one rocket scientist to another,” saying he had bought $1.3 billion in Bitcoin this year. The MicroStrategy CEO holds dual degrees from MIT in aeronautics and astronautics, and research, technology, and society.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, has an estimated net worth of more than $153 billion but kept just 0.25 BTC personally as of February 2019. On the other hand, according to some figures, Saylor, whose net worth is 300 times less, has led MicroStrategy, a business intelligence company, to make one of the biggest Bitcoin investments the world has seen this year from a major financial institution. Other crypto players were swift to respond to the inquiry by Musk about possibly making such a big purchase of crypto.
Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss also jumped into the discussion, telling Musk that there was “a lot of liquidity to get that done.” Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of the Hong Kong-based FTX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, told the billionaire that he might execute such a strategy “over the course of a week.”
Peter Schiff’s recognized gold bug, however, came out against the possible investment, referring to Bitcoin as a pyramid scheme and urging Musk to “[not] leave Tesla shareholders with the same bag as shareholders of MicroStrategy.”
Since announcing MicroStrategy’s first $250 million Bitcoin purchase as a reserve asset in August, Saylor has been vocal in his support of Bitcoin. He said that by incorporating Bitcoin into Apple Pay, creating a stable crypto wallet on the iPhone, and purchasing the crypto assets with the Treasury Reserves of the tech giant, tech companies like Apple could see a $100 billion increase in market capitalization.
