- Michael Saylor’s Strategy launched and upsized a new preferred stock offering from $500M to $2.8 billion.
- The ‘Stretch’ security promises a hefty 9% annual payout with no end date and a flexible, adjustable dividend.
- The deal is the latest in Saylor’s years-long effort to transform Strategy into a financial vehicle to acquire Bitcoin.
Michael Saylor’s relentless quest to transform his company, Strategy, into a Bitcoin-acquiring financial juggernaut has reached a new level of ambition.
The firm has launched and then promptly upsized a novel preferred stock offering, raising a staggering $2.8 billion in a deal that further showcases Saylor’s prowess in the capital markets and the insatiable investor appetite for exposure to the booming crypto market.
As crypto prices continue their upward march, Saylor’s Bitcoin holding company, Strategy, has once again demonstrated its unique ability to tap into market enthusiasm.
The company priced a new kind of security on Thursday, which it has dubbed “Stretch.” This offering promises buyers a hefty 9% annual payout with no specified end date, an unusual feature in the often-arcane world of preferred stock.
Initially planned as a $500 million deal, the offering was upsized to $2.8 billion due to overwhelming demand, according to a person familiar with the transaction who asked to remain anonymous.
This move is the latest, and perhaps most audacious, demonstration of Saylor’s Wall Street wizardry in his years-long effort to pivot a middling software firm, formerly known as MicroStrategy, into a corporate entity singularly obsessed with one goal: raising as much money as possible to acquire as many Bitcoin as possible.
At last count, the company’s hoard stood at some 600,000 coins, worth approximately $70 billion.
“This is not the first financial engineering initiative by Strategy,” noted Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke University. “In any situation where your company is worth far more than fundamental value, you raise money.”
Since Strategy’s first groundbreaking Bitcoin purchase in 2020, Saylor has employed a diverse range of financial instruments, including selling equity, issuing various types of debt, and layering multiple stacks of preferred shares.
In doing so, he has not only…