Michael Saylor: MicroStrategy Can Withstand a 90% Bitcoin Crash
Michael Saylor is making it clear that MicroStrategy (MSTR) has been built to weather even the harshest Bitcoin downturns—far beyond the threshold that would wipe out most leveraged players in the crypto ecosystem.
In a live interview with Grant Cardone on November 14, Saylor, MicroStrategy’s executive chairman, outlined the company’s resilience with a blunt assessment of its balance sheet. Saylor declared that even a catastrophic collapse in BTC prices would not force MicroStrategy to liquidate its core Bitcoin holdings.
**MicroStrategy Can Survive a 90% Bitcoin Collapse**
When asked how far Bitcoin would need to fall before MicroStrategy faced real danger, Saylor answered with numbers, not rhetoric. He cited approximately $8 billion in debt and tens of billions in equity value tied to Bitcoin, before setting a clear threshold:
> “Bitcoin would have to fall 90% from here for us to be sort of collateralized, to be one-on-one.”
Even at that extreme, Saylor said liquidation would not be the company’s response. Instead, equity holders would become the buffer:
> “We probably would dilute the equity, and so it would be bad for the equity,” Saylor explained. “The equity is going to be a loser.”
By contrast, Saylor described selling Bitcoin into a collapsing market as essentially off the table in any realistic scenario. When Cardone pressed him on whether MicroStrategy could be forced to unwind its Bitcoin position, Saylor answered flatly:
> “We’re not going to liquidate.”
The bondholders only come into play in an almost total-loss scenario. Saylor clarified:
> “If Bitcoin fell to zero tomorrow forever, then the bonds would default.”
He summed up the risk profile succinctly:
> “If you think Bitcoin is going to go to $10,000, I think we’re good. If you think Bitcoin’s going to a dollar tomorrow forever, then yeah, the bonds would default.”
The structure is clear: MicroStrategy’s equity is a highly levered, high-beta claim on Bitcoin and may be diluted if needed. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy’s bondholders and other creditors only face true risk if Bitcoin ceases to exist as an asset class.
**The Four-Year Cycle Narrative Is Dead**
Saylor took the opportunity to dispel one long-standing Bitcoin market myth: the four-year halving cycle. While many Bitcoin traders still put faith in this pattern, Saylor sees the mechanical supply cuts as becoming far less influential in today’s macro-driven markets.
> “I don’t believe in four-year cycles anyway,” Saylor stated. “I think that they might have had some credence in the first 12 years.”
He converted the post-halving supply reduction into simple numbers:
> “225 Bitcoin a day get taken out of the supply after the next halving—that’s twenty million or twenty-two million dollars of buying.”
Saylor compared this to the scale of daily spot and derivatives trading:
> “Trust me, twenty million dollars of buying is not even a third-order issue at this point.”
**What Really Drives Bitcoin Now?**
So, what does matter? Saylor pointed to macroeconomic factors and the impact of institutional flows:
> “The dynamics in the market are much more that Jerome Powell thinks he wants to hold interest rates higher for longer. It’s macroeconomics. It’s political. It’s structural. When IBIT’s derivatives market went from $10 billion to $50 billion, it did that in four weeks. It’s the actions of the mega finance actors that are determining the future of Bitcoin right now.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $95,624.
*Featured image from YouTube. Chart from TradingView.com.*
https://www.newsbtc.com/bitcoin-news/strategy-survive-90-bitcoin-crash-saylor-yes/
