Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy Inc., posted six words on X on Thursday: buy more Bitcoin than you sell.
Buy more bitcoin than you sell.
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) May 7, 2026
The post came days after Saylor spent a chunk of the company’s May 5 earnings call explaining how Strategy might periodically sell some of its Bitcoin to cover dividend payments on its preferred stock instrument, STRC. For a company that built its entire market premium on the promise of never parting with a single satoshi, the suggestion was a real shift.
Strategy holds 818,334 Bitcoin, worth roughly $64 billion. The company accumulated this position over six years by issuing equity and debt instruments to fund purchase after purchase.
How math works
Strategy launched STRC, a variable-rate perpetual preferred stock, in July 2025. The instrument pays dividends that now total roughly $1.2 billion per year at an annualized rate of about 11.5%. Saylor’s argument on the earnings call was that Bitcoin itself can fund those payments, as long as the asset appreciates faster than about 2.3% annually.
Above that threshold, Strategy can sell small slices of its holdings to cover dividends and still end up with more Bitcoin than it started with, because proceeds from new STRC issuances keep flowing into fresh purchases.
“We could stop selling MSTR, our common stock right now,” Saylor said on the call. “We can fund the dividends with Bitcoin sales. And if Stretch issuance is greater than that BTC breakeven number, not only will we fund the dividends forever, we will increase the amount of Bitcoin that we hold forever at the same time.”
Saylor’s conservative scenario assumes Bitcoin appreciates around 10% per year, roughly in line with the S&P 500’s long-run average. His base case is 30%. At a 20% annual STRC issuance pace, he projects the company could add 144,000 Bitcoin in a single year, even after selling some to meet obligations, and without touching the equity markets at all.
Market reaction and Q1 numbers
Strategy’s stock dropped about 4% in after-hours trading following the earnings release. Bitcoin itself held relatively steady at $82,000.
The company reported a net loss of $12.5 billion for the first quarter of 2026, driven almost entirely by $14.4 billion in unrealized losses on its Bitcoin position. Bitcoin dipped to around $62,000 in March before recovering to the low $80,000s by early May.
Those paper losses are an accounting artifact under the new fair-value rules, not a cash event. But they create uncomfortable headlines arriving alongside talk of Bitcoin sales.