On the eve of Microstrategy‘s stock exchange debut In June 1998, founder Michael Saylor stayed in a penthouse suite at the Lotte New York Palace in midtown Manhattan. Saylor, who was 33 at the time, says it was the most exquisite hotel room he had ever seen, paid for by major insurer Merrill Lynch.

The next morning, Saylor went to the Nasdaq trading floor to watch his company’s stock open. He recalled seeing a notice above the ticker warning traders: “Please do not confuse MSTR with MSFT.” The latter was one of them Microsoftthe software giant that had gone public 13 years earlier.

Shares of MicroStrategy rose 76% in their debut, joining the ranks of tech companies benefiting from the dot-com boom.

“It was a good day,” Saylor told CNBC.

More than 26 years later, MicroStrategy and Microsoft were linked again, but for a very different reason. In December 2024, Saylor went before Microsoft shareholders and tried to convince them that the company, now valued at over $3 trillion, should use some of its $78.4 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term Investments should be made in the company Bitcoin.

“Microsoft cannot afford to miss the next wave of technology, and Bitcoin is that wave,” Saylor said in a video presentation published on X last week. The post has more than 3.6 million views.

Saylor has fully implemented this strategy. MicroStrategy has purchased 439,000 Bitcoin since mid-2020, a stockpile that is now worth about $42 billion and the basis for the company’s explosive market capitalization from about $1.1 billion at the time the plan was implemented to 82 billion US dollars.

MicroStrategy’s software unit, which specializes in business intelligence, generates quarterly revenue of just over $100 million. After soaring in 1998 and 1999, the stock collapsed in the dot-com bust and lost almost all of its value. In the decades that followed, the price slowly recovered before rising rapidly due to Bitcoin.

Four years after its Bitcoin buying spree, MicroStrategy is a global leader fourth largest ownerbehind sole creator Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and crypto exchange Binance.

At Microsoft, the shareholder vote supported by Saylor failed resoundingly – less than 1% of investors voted in favor.

But the spectacle gave Saylor, now 59, another opportunity to preach the gospel of Bitcoin and tout the benefits of converting as much cash as possible into this single digital asset. It’s a story that has engulfed Wall Street.

MicroStrategy shares are up 477% this year as of Friday’s close, ranking second AppLovin It ranks among all U.S. tech companies valued at $5 billion or more, according to FactSet data. This follows a 346% increase in 2023.

While the rally was well underway well before November of this year, Donald Trump’s election victory, which was heavily funded by the crypto industry, boosted the stock even more. Stocks have risen 60% since the Nov. 5 election and finally surpassed their dot-com era peak in 2000 on Nov. 11.

Saylor has long spoken about Bitcoin in an evangelical way and co-authored a 2022 book about it called “What is Money?” But his critics have recently become louder than ever, describe Saylor as a cult-like leader and his strategy as “Ponzi loop” This involves issuing debt and equity to buy Bitcoin, watching MicroStrategy’s stock price rise, and then doing more of the same.

“Wash, rinse, repeat – what could go wrong?” wrote Peter Schiff, chief economist and global strategist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, on November 12 Post on X to his 1 million followers.

Saylor, who has 3.8 million followers, addressed the growing chorus of skeptics in an interview with CNBC’s “Money Movers” last week.

“Just like developers in Manhattan, every time the value of real estate in Manhattan goes up, they issue more debt to develop more properties. That’s why the buildings in New York City are so tall,” Saylor said in a clip posted to X by his legion of fans. “It’s been around for 350 years. I would call it an economy.”

Saylor is a frequent guest on CNBC and appears on various programs throughout the year. He also agreed to two interviews with CNBC.com, one in September and one shortly after the election.

The first of these conversations took place at the Lotte, just a few elevator stops from the penthouse where he stayed before his stock went public on the Nasdaq. Saylor gave a conference keynote speech at the hotel and also attended meetings.

He wore a designer suit and an orange Hermès tie to match the Bitcoin color. The election was less than two months away, and crypto companies were pumping money into the Trump campaign after the Republican candidate and former president previously described Bitcoin as a “Fraud against the dollar” began to ensure a much more crypto-friendly administration.

Two months earlier, in July, Trump gave a keynote address at the largest Bitcoin conference of the year in Nashville, Tennessee, where he promised to fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, an industry critic, and said the US would become the “crypto capital of the planet” if he won.

MicroStrategy has become even more aggressive in its Bitcoin purchases. Saylor said in one post On December 16, he announced that his company had purchased 15,350 Bitcoin for $1.5 billion in six days from December 9.

So far this year, MicroStrategy has purchased 249,850 Bitcoin, with nearly two-thirds of those purchases occurring since November 11th.

“We wanted to do it anyway,” said Saylor, referring to the election results. “But the headwind has turned into a tailwind.”

A week before the election, MicroStrategy announced in its quarterly issue Results publication a plan to raise $42 billion over three years. This included a stock sale worth up to $21 billion by financial firms such as TD Securities and Barclays, freeing up significantly more liquidity for Bitcoin purchases.

Saylor told CNBC it was “probably the most important earnings release in the company’s history.”

No possession is too much for Saylor, who predicted in September that Bitcoin could reach $13 million by 2045, which would represent annual growth of 29%.

“We’re just going to buy higher up forever,” he said in the same television interview in which he compared Bitcoin to real estate in New York. “Every day is a good day to buy Bitcoin. We think of it as cyber Manhattan.”

Saylor speaks enthusiastically about Bitcoin as the foundation of a new digital economy that will only get bigger. But even since he launched his Bitcoin strategy in 2020, investors have faced major problems – the stock lost 74% of its value in 2022 before rising sharply over the past two years.

Nevertheless, he advises companies to imitate his strategy. Microsoft didn’t listen, but Saylor said there were a lot of “zombie companies” with core businesses that weren’t going anywhere and could put their money to better use.

“The traditional advice would be: When you do a transformational acquisition, you realize you need a merger partner. “You’re dead. Find someone to merge with,” Saylor said at Lotte in September. “Bitcoin is the universal merger partner, right? The real appeal of digital capital is that you can fix any company.”

REGARD: CNBC’s full interview with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy