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Bitcoin is falling and taking Strategy down with it
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Bitcoin (BTC-USD) is falling fast enough that you should probably look it up right now if you want an accurate price.
On Thursday, it fell below $64,000 for the first time since October 2024.
The cryptocurrency has fallen more than 45% from last year’s record, and the intensifying sell-off has evaporated all the gains investors have made during Trump’s second term.
And it’s taking Michael Saylor’s famous bitcoin treasury firm, Strategy (MSTR), along for the ride down.
Strategy shares tumbled 17% on Thursday ahead of its fourth quarter results. And even with a cautious bounce on Friday morning, the stock is on track for steep weekly losses.
The company holds 713,502 bitcoins with an average purchase price of $76,052, roughly 20% more than what bitcoin is trading for. Strategy reported operating losses of $17.4 billion, compared to $1 billion in the same period in 2024.
Read more: How to navigate a crypto meltdown
The company’s premise sounded too good to be true: sell new shares and debt and keep buying crypto.
For more than a while, it worked as bitcoin rose, even as scores of lesser latecomers turned into copycats. Shares of Strategy, the company that pioneered a new kind of perpetual-motion money machine, skyrocketed over the last several years, rising almost 700% in 18 months from January 2024 to the end of July 2024.
Investors willingly paid Michael Saylor’s firm a premium over the actual price of the digital currency, and the company that had amassed the largest corporate stockpile of bitcoin was worth more than the bitcoin it held. Now, bitcoin has fallen far below the average price at which it was purchased.
The math was dumbfounding, but early investors made stupid money. Until they didn’t.
But don’t bother conducting a welfare check on Saylor and Strategy. He appears fine and is posting through it.
You can find him on X, urging the crypto faithful to stay strong, echoing their mantra and battle cry: “HODL.”
If you’re more of a visual person, you might take heart in the crypto-positive, AI-generated photos of himself he’s put out.
Other people are panicking, though. And the question of why this is happening — broader tech pessimism, the likelihood of a new, hawkish Fed chair, Treasury Secretary Bessent suggesting the government won’t come to the rescue — is less important than what happens next, and why this collapse feels defining.
