Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses Bitcoin

MicroStrategy Reports $1 Billion Loss, CEO Steps Down To Focus On Bitcoin (bloomberg.com) 61

Posted by BeauHD from the doubling-down-on-bitcoin dept.
MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor gave up his chief executive officer title and said he'll focus more on Bitcoin after the enterprise-software maker reported a loss of more than $1 billion related to the second-quarter plunge in the price of the cryptocurrency. Bloomberg reports: Saylor, who founded the Tysons Corner, Virginia-based company in 1989, will continue to serve as executive chairman as retains its Bitcoin buying strategy. MicroStrategy President Phong Le will take on the chief executive role. The company also filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to register 450,000 shares. MicroStrategy took a $917.8 million impairment charge related to the decline in the value of the Bitcoin it holds. Bitcoin tumbled 59% in the quarter, and traded about 45% lower than the price at the end of the year-earlier period.

Revenue dropped to $122.1 million. Analysts polled by Bloomberg expected revenue of $123.25 million in the second quarter. Net quarterly loss of $1.062 billion compared with a loss of $299.3 million in the same quarter of last year. The quarterly loss is almost exactly twice the company's revenue in the last 12 months. As of June 30, the carrying value of the company's 129,699 Bitcoins was $1.988 billion, the company said, reflecting the cumulative impairment loss of $1.989 billion. The cumulative amount is now more than Bitcoin on the company's balance sheet. "MicroStrategy's original strategy and consulting business needs full-time attention," said Henry Elder, head of decentralized finance at Wave Financial. "Now Michael can focus on what he does best, promoting Bitcoin. And the company can focus on making more money to buy more Bitcoin. They are basically doubling down."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

MicroStrategy Reports $1 Billion Loss, CEO Steps Down To Focus On Bitcoin More

MicroStrategy Reports $1 Billion Loss, CEO Steps Down To Focus On Bitcoin

Comments Filter:

  • Bitcoin (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @09:43PM (#62757628) Homepage

    Let me see if I got this right:

    They just lost a billion in Bitcoin so he's stepping down as CEO to focus more on Bitcoin.

    • Re:Bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @10:33PM (#62757678) Homepage

      They just lost a billion in Bitcoin so he's stepping down as CEO to focus more on Bitcoin.

      When you're rich enough you can actually fail upwards. It's a shame these sorts of people never seem to lose everything to the point where they have to take a job ringing up groceries at Walmart.

    • Yes, because they did not loose 1 billion in bitcoin. If they sold the bitcoin, they would have lost 1 billion, but they did not, so they did not loose anything.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

        Yes, because they did not loose 1 billion in bitcoin. If they sold the bitcoin, they would have lost 1 billion, but they did not, so they did not loose anything.

        If you bought $100 worth of Bitcoin and now you have $33, your portfolio has a loss of $67. Sure, you might have hopes and dreams and jellybeans that it'll go back up if you HODL, but that's a gamble - as of this moment, you have a loss.

        • Yes, because they did not loose 1 billion in bitcoin. If they sold the bitcoin, they would have lost 1 billion, but they did not, so they did not loose anything.

          If you bought $100 worth of Bitcoin and now you have $33, your portfolio has a loss of $67. Sure, you might have hopes and dreams and jellybeans that it'll go back up if you HODL, but that's a gamble - as of this moment, you have a loss.

          Sure. But equally, if you bought $100 worth of Bitcoin, and it rose in value to $1b, and then dropped to $500m, you haven't lost $500m. Even if you knew it had peaked, you'd be very hard pressed to liquidate that $1b anyway.

          That said, putting all your eggs in one basket is a ridiculous thing to do.

    • This sounds amazing. Where do I invest???

    • his corporate shakeup strategy is definitely micro

    • Maybe he thinks that's the reason Bitcoin tanked. He lost focus.

      Thank goodness he's working on it again so everyone will get their money back.

      Quick! Everyone needs to buy back into Bitcoin!

    • Yes. It's a polite way to shuffle him off to a place where the damage has been done already, while making sure the grownups take control of the actual business.

      If he has enough shares, he can do a lot of damage otherwise.

      • Yup. Sounds slightly better than "spending more time with my family (because I am also negotiating an expensive divorce while trying to keep my mistress off the radar)".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      They just lost a billion in Bitcoin so he's stepping down as CEO to focus more on Bitcoin.

      Do what they say, "Buy the dip!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      "Now Michael can focus on what he does best, promoting Bitcoin."

      He just changed focus to get in more suckers to raise the price again. Seems totally valid.

    • Seems like a fairly apt metaphor for a lot of crypto schemes

      The Simpsons
      " Molloy casually observes that Homer and the cops would like to know where he hid his loot. When Molloy tells them the stash is hidden under a giant "T" somewhere in Springfield, they rush from the station hoping to find the buried treasure. After checking several possible sites, the crowd returns to get more information from Molloy, who directs them to a large, T-shaped palm tree on the outskirts of town. The residents excavate the si

    • Of course he did, its probably where he got the Bitcoin to buy the Bitcoin so that he could focus on Bitcoin.

      “Stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically. In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending.” — Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

  • This guy is wealthy, and will stay that way no matter how many companies he runs into the ground. After all, it's only investors' money. As long as he talks a good game (and he's a specialist at that), he can just keep up the charade forever.

    • This guy is wealthy, and will stay that way no matter how many companies he runs into the ground. After all, it's only investors' money. As long as he talks a good game (and he's a specialist at that), he can just keep up the charade forever.

      Sounds like he'd have a shot at running for president, if the whole doubling down on Bitcoin thing doesn't work out.

    • It's loaned money from creditors, who are likely fucked.

  • that's like saying you're going to start focusing on your health by eating asbestos.

  • We used to call them (Score:5, Informative)

    by sentiblue ( 3535839 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @11:02PM (#62757732)
    Microcatastrophe

    The application that we used is called IntelligenceServer... but I didn't see a damn thing intelligent about it. In fact it was extremely dumb... After a long while struggling with it, we switched to Cognos.
    • I googled these softwares and both companies can't explain what they are. No sentence like: "Cognos is a X", only BS: "Cognos will help you to do fuzzy things powered by AI"

      • Re:We used to call them (Score:4, Insightful)

        by narcc ( 412956 ) on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @01:22AM (#62757906) Journal

        I just have one question: is their AI strategy positioned to reorient our alignment to qualitize synergy so that we can retarget our hyperlocal growth hacking?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ebunga ( 95613 )

          That sounds like a bunch of technobabble marketing speak to confuse the situation. It leverages your structured and unstructured data along with your social networks to synergize marketing strategies with optimal sales-to-production pipelines maximizing year-over-year growth with minimal TCO.

      • They're reporting tools. They make pretty reports and dashboards. That's it.

      • Yeah they do. Cognos is a BI company. The problem you have is that you expect BI to define what specific intelligence you need. It's kind of like expecting a database vendor to say they only track employees, or only manage inventory, or only record financial transactions.

        Business Intelligence and analytics are both right there on Cognos's front page. It's up to you to know what data you have, and what intelligence and predications you want to make from it. Some people may use it to estimate when their inven

        • Ah, Cognos. I first got my hands on it in the mid aughts, and as a mid sized company (~$500M in revenue) I was given full access. It was quite useful, usable, and perfect for me, the data gleaner. I am sure it has become more encrusted with cruft and MBA candy since, but back then it was pretty cool and extremely valuable.

          Since then, I have been forced to use mostly Oracle BI, and that is a homeless abortion of a product.

          • I see multiple people keep referring to Cognos as a company. It's not! This is an IBM product. Cognos was acquired by IBM roughly back in 2007 for $5B, that's a very long time ago

        • It's up to you to know what data you have, and what intelligence and predications you want to make from it.

          And that's always been the problem with "big data" & analytics, i.e. It's not what you *want* to make from it, it's what you *can reasonably* make from it, which turns out to be very limited in most cases. If you have a question, first decide what data you'd need to answer & how you'd need to control to threats to construct validity & how you'll deal with reliability issues. Anything else is just bad science & wouldn't make it past a peer review (which isn't setting the bar very high judging

          • "Analytics" (as opposed to proper science)

            Oh horseshit. Analytics is the application of proper science and math. Nothing more. Nothing less. It doesn't exist in a vacuum that people make up themselves. Just because you've seen a few bad implementations of data analytics doesn't make it any less "proper science" than seeing a typical slashdot post and declaring that statistics isn't "proper maths".

            I do agree it's overhyped though, that said quite a few times the hype pays off (not for MicroStrategy though, clearly they don't have a clue how to run a

            • Nope. It's a real problem to the point where I've seen several presentations at various conferences ringing alarm bells & citing examples where analytics were a waste of time & resources (which most institutions can ill-afford) or even harmful. People trained in research methods & statistics know what the issues with threats to validity are, e.g. the well-known & to be avoided technique of p-hacking with large datasets. It's becoming clear that many of the people responsible for allocating r

  • It's like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan (Score:4, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @11:27PM (#62757758)

    The problem is they didn't believe hard enough in the Bitcoin!

  • Musk to leave Tesla (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @12:05AM (#62757810)

    It's like Musk is going to leave Tesla, and focus on customizing F-150s to roll coal on cyclists.

  • Imagine this happening 3 months earlier when bitcoins were actually worth something and he had to explain a loss of 5 billions!

  • It certainly does sound like they have a very micro strategy.
  • Make it a Double Down from KFC!

  • FTFA
    "MicroStrategy began investing in Bitcoin in the summer of 2020, after Saylor said he saw it as a hedge against inflation"

    That seems to be completely invalidated. Bitcoin is most definitely not performing as a hedge for inflation. In fairness neither is gold, the old standard-bearer.So who knows nowadays?

    "As of June 30, the carrying value of the company’s 129,699 Bitcoins was $1.988 billion, the company said, reflecting the cumulative impairment loss of $1.989 billion. The cumulative [impairment

  • "Now Michael can focus on what he does best, losing money on Bitcoin fantasies".

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Close