Deep dive: How Michael Saylor came back from losing $6B in 1 day
The post Deep dive: How Michael Saylor came back from losing $6B in 1 day appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Bitcoin has multiple personalities, equal parts money, freedom, resistance and hope. MicroStrategy chairman Michael Saylor sits below all of them as bitcoin’s id — its rawest instincts, personified. Thursday marked the 25th anniversary of Saylor losing $6 billion in one day ($11 billion adjusted for inflation) as the dot-com bubble burst. That event was among the biggest single-day personal losses in human history until that point. This is his comeback story. Premium domains Saylor was not always the apex Bitcoin bull. He did, however, understand digital scarcity long before the first block was ever mined: in domain names. After founding MicroStrategy in 1989 and spending years building it up as a data mining and business intelligence operation, Saylor in the ‘90s had the bright idea to start buying up “premium” domain names: simple, single-word domains with potentially universal appeal and, preferably, over 500 million hits on Google Search. Angel.com. Alarm.com. Wisdom.com. Emma.com. Speaker.com. Alert.com. Voice.com. Hope.com. Only one person could ever own each one at a time, and MicroStrategy spent $2 million overall acquiring those types of premium domains — at an average of around $100,000 each — alongside thousands of less valuable secondary domains. “I bought all these domains because I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language?’” Saylor said on the My First Million podcast. He personally owns Michael.com and one for his nickname, Mike.com. “I mean, [as to] owning ‘hope’ or owning ‘voice’ — eventually, there’ll be a Google Voice, or some telecom company will want to launch a service. And what a great domain to launch on — a word like ‘Voice.com.’” Alarm.com and Angel.com were later commercialized with real companies, respectively spun up by Saylor…
Filed under: News - @ March 21, 2025 5:20 pm