Were We Wrong About Michael Saylor? | Simply Originals

**Rustin** (0:00)
For four years, one man's entire public identity was four words. Never sell your Bitcoin. Michael Saylor said it on every stage, in every interview. He bet a public company on it. He bet his name on it. And just a couple days ago, in a board authorization, that changed.

**Michael Saylor** (0:22)
And my last point to you, you do not sell your Bitcoin.

**Rustin** (0:28)
No, I'm not here to tell you Michael Saylor is a criminal. I'm not here to cancel Giga Chad, or even say he's Giga Bad for Bitcoin. I'm here to do something simpler. I'm going to lay out four things that are all, every one of them, a matter of public record. A board authorization, a subsidiary company, a federal security agreement, and a post that got a man banned from X before it resurfaced on Nostr. I'm going to show you the documents. I'm going to separate what we know from what we can only infer. And then I'm going to let you draw the conclusion that I think the evidence is pointing toward. You decide, because the question isn't really, did Saylor sell? Or is he going to sell $1.25 billion worth of Bitcoin? The question is, was strategy ever only about Bitcoin? Or was it always something bigger? Welcome back, I'm Rustin, and we got a rabbit hole to go down.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:30)
No, no, the question I'm trying to get to, though, is like within 25, like you launching the Preferreds, which I think are a really interesting product. Does that change the playbook for all these other companies, and how do they now compete against you now you have the Preferreds as well?

**Michael Saylor** (1:45)
Again, I take issue with your question. It's an ignorant, insulting, myopic question. Why do you frame things that way? We're not competing with each other. That's like saying, well, I heard my neighbor bought Bitcoin and I bought Bitcoin. There's not enough room for both of us to buy Bitcoin. We're competing with each other. Now, what's my neighbor's got to buy another crypto asset? We're not competing with each other, Danny.
That's the ignorant part of the question. That's what I take issue with.
If you're a hotel company in Japan, you're competing with other hotel companies in Japan. And the decision to buy Bitcoin is just a decision to improve the quality of your company. It's like saying how many companies can have electricity. I heard 200 companies have electricity, but there's one company that uses a lot of it. So do the other companies have to change their strategy? Dude, like, you think they had the same strategy?
It's a silly question, and it's a myopic, ignorant, toxic framing of a question. And the result is, you know, you come to some ignorant conclusion.

**Rustin** (3:06)
So were we wrong about Saylor? Has he lost the plot?
Let's start with what actually happened, because the facts matter more than our emotions and reactions. And if you're new here, don't forget to click Subscribe. It really helps us out and helps you stay informed with the best in Bitcoin news delivered to you daily.
Okay, so Strategies Board authorized something they're calling the Bitcoin Monetization Program. And under it, the company can now sell Bitcoin for three specific purposes. One, build a US dollar reserve. Two, fund the dividends on its preferred stock and the interest on its debt. Three, buy back its own common stock and its digital credit securities. Here's the honest version, taken on its own. A CFO building in flexibility is not a scandal. That's kind of the job. The CFO, Andrew King, framed it exactly that way. Greater flexibility to use its Bitcoin reserves while maintaining shareholder value. Reasonable words on their face. But context is everything. This is the company whose whole thesis, the reason retail bought in, the reason nation states paid attention, was that it would never do this. The capital structure used to point one direction. Accumulate, now it has two points. And one of those directions is the exit. And here's a part that gives some people pause. This is a company carrying roughly a billion and a half dollars in preferred obligations.
Small in comparison to that massive stack, but payments that come due on a schedule, whether Bitcoin is up or down, an authorization to sell in that situation is a pressure valve. And pressure valves get used. And this isn't just me connecting dots. Bloomberg, reporting on the overhaul, put it plainly, the move was meant to show strategy would support its dividend, and instead it raised fresh doubts about the durability of the structure. That word, structure, is the whole story. So let's look at the structure, because there's a piece of it almost nobody talks about. There's a company called MicroStrategy Government Services, MGS. If you hold MicroStrategy and you've never heard of it, you're not alone. Most shareholders haven't. Here's what the research and claims show. Around 2021-2022, the same year Saylor took the Bitcoin strategy fully public, Strategy incorporated this subsidiary on paper, its purpose is selling software to the US government. And by itself, that's unremarkable. Plenty of companies do that. What's not unremarkable is how it's governed. MGS operates under what's called a special security agreement, allegedly. And if that's the case, it's not a casual arrangement. A special security agreement is a formal federal mechanism used when a company handles classified information. Of course, if they're doing data exchange as a software company, understandable. But under it, the company hands over a degree of operational control to a board the US government has to approve. Now read that again. A subsidiary of the company holding the largest Bitcoin treasury on Earth is governed by an agreement in which the founder doesn't fully control his own board, allegedly. So who is on it? This is all public. And apparently it includes someone named Karen Schaeffer. And this pedigree is crazy. 26 years at the CIA. And according to her own record, she managed covert action programs at the National Security Council.