Michael Saylor’s firm adds 1,142 BTC as analysts stay bullish on MSTR despite $5B paper loss
Michael Saylor has once again increased his company’s exposure to Bitcoin, pressing ahead with his accumulation playbook even as the market trades well below the firm’s average entry price and paper losses mount into the billions.
According to the latest disclosure, the company purchased an additional 1,142 Bitcoin (BTC) at an average price of 78,815 dollars per coin, spending roughly 90 million dollars on the new tranche. After this buy, the firm now holds 714,644 BTC, with a total acquisition cost of about 54.35 billion dollars, implying an average purchase price of around 76,056 dollars per Bitcoin.
With Bitcoin currently hovering near 69,000 dollars, the company’s vast holdings are sitting on an unrealized loss of nearly 10 percent relative to its average cost basis. In absolute terms, the mark-to-market drawdown is around 5 billion dollars, underscoring just how closely the firm’s balance sheet and market valuation are tied to Bitcoin’s price swings.
The latest financial report highlights the impact of this strategy on the company’s books. Operating loss has widened to approximately 17.4 billion dollars as BTC’s price slide intensified, while net loss has reached roughly 12.4 billion dollars. If Bitcoin remains in a downtrend or even trades sideways below the firm’s average cost, those headline loss figures are likely to stay elevated, even though they remain unrealized.
A key pillar of Saylor’s strategy has been the aggressive use of equity financing to fund Bitcoin purchases. Rather than relying solely on cash flow or traditional debt, the company has repeatedly tapped the equity markets, issuing new shares to raise capital and convert those proceeds into BTC. Currently, it has authorization to issue more than 7.9 billion dollars’ worth of common stock for this purpose, alongside over 20 billion dollars in available preferred shares.
This approach has significantly diluted existing shareholders. The total share count has surged from about 77 million in 2021 to more than 300 million outstanding shares today. In effect, each individual share now represents a smaller slice of the company and its Bitcoin pile, even as the absolute size of the BTC holdings has grown.
Despite the dilution and the eye-catching losses on paper, many Wall Street analysts are increasingly constructive on the stock, viewing it as a leveraged way to gain exposure to a potential Bitcoin rebound. One major firm has reiterated an overweight rating on the shares with a 192‑dollar price target. Other brokerages are even more optimistic: some have set targets around 250 dollars, while others project 185, 403, and 268 dollars respectively.
When aggregated, recent analyst forecasts point to a consensus target near 347 dollars per share. That implies upside of around 176 percent from the current trading level, assuming the stock begins to re-rate in line with a future recovery in the Bitcoin price. In practice, these targets are less about traditional earnings metrics and more about expectations for the next big BTC cycle.
The stock’s behavior continues to underscore how tightly it is coupled to Bitcoin. On a recent Friday session, as BTC ripped from about 60,000 dollars to above 70,000 dollars, the company’s shares jumped almost 30 percent in a single day. The rally illustrated why some investors treat the stock as a high‑beta proxy for Bitcoin itself: when BTC moves, the equity tends to move more, in both directions.
For long‑term holders and potential new investors, the situation creates a complex risk–reward profile. On one hand, a strong Bitcoin bull run could rapidly erase the company’s unrealized losses and push its holdings deeply into profit, likely lifting the stock alongside. On the other hand, persistent weakness or a prolonged crypto bear market would keep pressure on the balance sheet, make the large loss figures more politically and psychologically difficult to ignore, and potentially force tough decisions about capital structure.
Saylor’s reliance on dollar-cost averaging is central to this thesis. Rather than attempting to time market bottoms, the firm keeps adding BTC over time, regardless of near‑term price action. The rationale is that over a sufficiently long horizon, Bitcoin will, in his view, significantly outperform cash, bonds, and even many equities, making the current drawdowns a temporary accounting problem rather than a permanent capital impairment. Critics argue that this assumes a very optimistic scenario for BTC and underestimates regulatory, macroeconomic, and technological risks.
Dilution remains one of the most controversial aspects of the strategy. Each new share sold to buy Bitcoin may help the company increase its total BTC stack, but it also spreads future upside across a wider base. Supporters counter that as long as the company can issue shares at valuations that embed a premium to the underlying Bitcoin, the trade remains accretive on a per‑BTC basis, effectively allowing the firm to use its stock as a kind of “Bitcoin acquisition engine.” Skeptics respond that this logic only holds as long as investor enthusiasm for the equity persists.
Another layer of complexity is accounting. Current rules force companies to recognize impairment losses when Bitcoin falls below its purchase price, while often limiting the ability to mark gains back up during rallies in the same symmetric way. This asymmetry can make income statements look disproportionately negative during downturns, even when the underlying economic thesis has not changed. As a result, headline operating and net loss figures can be misleading if viewed outside the context of BTC’s volatility and the firm’s long‑term holding intention.
For traders, the stock offers volatility and leverage; for fundamental investors, the question is whether they are comfortable effectively owning a large, actively managed Bitcoin treasury wrapped in a corporate shell. That involves assessing not just the future of BTC, but also management’s commitment to the strategy, the sustainability of capital raising, governance standards, and the potential impact of future regulations on both crypto assets and publicly traded companies that hold them.
Looking ahead, the path of both the company and its stock will mostly track Bitcoin’s broader macro narrative: institutional adoption, ETF flows, regulatory clarity, global liquidity conditions, and the ongoing debate over BTC as “digital gold” versus a speculative asset. A sharp, sustained recovery in BTC could quickly shift the conversation from losses and dilution to windfall gains and strategic brilliance. Conversely, a renewed crypto winter would test investors’ patience and the resilience of Saylor’s high‑conviction approach.
For now, the firm remains fully committed: buying into weakness, expanding its BTC reserves, and accepting short‑term red ink and shareholder dilution in exchange for long‑term upside tied to the success of Bitcoin itself. Wall Street’s growing list of bullish price targets suggests that, at least among professional analysts, there is still considerable belief that this gamble will eventually pay off.