Bitcoin he fell to $61,400 overnight before paring losses to $62,400 in after-hours trading on Thursday, down 7% over the past 24 hours and up 14% over the past week. Michael Saylor’s MSTR strategy is down about 15% in 5 trading days.
The drop has pushed bitcoin into a technical bear market, with bitcoin now down 22.7% from its four-week high, wiping $600 billion off the crypto market’s total value.
At the center of the debate is Vice Chairman of Strategy Michael Saylor, who visited X Thursday morning to give his reading on the selloff.
“Capital markets are funding AI at historic high: ~$400B in 6 months,” Saylor he wrote. “Bitcoin ETFs have seen ~$4B of outflows since May 14, pushing up BTC. This is a money change, not a crash for Bitcoin. Volatility brings opportunity.”
Saylor’s opinion is that corporations are pulling money from bitcoin and sending it to intellectual property – trading, not a decision on the stock. AI’s investment figures give his argument weight. A Wall Street consensus puts the combined hyperscaler capital spending at more than $600 billion in 2026 alone, according to CreditSights. comparison about $450 billion of that is going into AI hardware, servers, and network equipment.
Saylor sells bitcoin
But Saylor’s words came with an undertone that the bears had a hard time ignoring. Strategy, the world’s largest bitcoin company with 843,706 BTC, to be revealed in June 1 Form 8-K that he sold 32 bitcoins between May 26 and May 31 at an average price of $77,135 per coin, raising $2.5 million in net income. Stated purpose: to fund the payment of shares held by the STRC Company.
In dollar terms, the transaction is a rounding error of about $61 billion. In psychological terms, the market saw it as a cultural break.
Strategy had not traded a single bitcoin since the end of 2022, and Saylor’s identity as an unwavering bitcoin booster became a market symbol in itself. Analysts said the move deepened bearish sentiment and added to the fall in prices.
Two weeks ago and one week before the sale, Strategy change it his goal from buying bitcoin to strengthening his website, is to buy back $1.5 billion of his convertible notes 0% due in 2029 for about $1.38 billion – an 8% discount that reduced his debt by about $120 million.
The move lowered the company’s total debt from $8.2 billion to $6.7 billion and left it with $871 million in cash. At the time, Strategy held 843,738 BTC at the time and said it plans to rebuild its liquidity buffer through futures.
