Saylor Says Rival Strive's Bitcoin (BTC) Buys Would Lift MicroStrategy's 847,666 Holdings

Saylor's Case for His Rival

Michael Saylor's argument only holds if more issuers buying coins makes the asset itself more valuable, and that is the premise the MicroStrategy Executive Chairman chose to defend in public on Wednesday. In an essay posted to X on September 30, Saylor wrote that he wants Strive, the smaller treasury company that competes with his own firm for investor capital, to succeed alongside every well-managed issuer of Bitcoin-powered digital credit. The goodwill is unusual in direction: MSTR issuer Strategy holds 847,666 BTC, the largest stash of any listed company and the biggest corporate whale position in the asset, while Strive ranks fifth among public holders with 27,462 BTC, public treasury trackers show. Openly backing a competitor from the top of that table is rare in a sector where treasury executives chase the same investor flow. Both companies run the same playbook: they raise money from investors and spend it on the asset, building corporate Bitcoin reserves at a scale matched by few others. In Saylor's framing, every coin Strive buys adds demand against a fixed supply, so a rising market lifts both companies' holdings in step, and the Bitcoin price stood near $83,699 when the essay appeared. “I want Strive to succeed. I want every well-managed issuer of Bitcoin-powered Digital Credit to succeed,” Saylor wrote in the essay. Both firms also sell shares that pay investors a regular income: Strategy markets its version as STRC, and Strive sells SATA. More sellers of such instruments, Saylor argued, could build trust across the category and lower borrowing costs for every issuer in it. Strive CEO Matt Cole agreed in a reply, writing that the two firms are stronger together and that the industry's task is to grow digital credit into a multi-trillion dollar asset class.

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Wrote in the essay.

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Strive Is Also a Strategy Customer

The commercial ties go further than sentiment. In March, Strive bought $50 million of Strategy's STRC shares, which makes the rival a customer as well as a competitor. Saylor has publicly congratulated Strive on earlier purchases, including a 1,355 BTC buy on September 21, and both firms added coins again this week, with MicroStrategy purchasing 1,666 BTC. A follow-up post from Saylor put the shared thesis plainly: broader adoption strengthens balance sheets, lowers credit costs and expands equity valuations for companies running Bitcoin treasuries on either side of the table. The economics underneath, however, depend on continuous fundraising. Bitcoin pays no interest, and Saylor acknowledged in the same essay that the income promised to investors must come from company cash or fresh capital raises. Strive covered 85% of the money for its latest purchase by selling SATA, Cole said, at an average cost of $85,396 per coin, above the market level at the time of the deal. That premium, roughly $1,700 over the Wednesday spot level, is the price of funding accumulation through income shares rather than cash reserves. Conviction is not uniform across the sector: an analysis by DWF Ventures found that only four of the top 20 crypto treasury stocks trade above the value of the coins they hold. Spot ETF structures rarely show such discounts, because creation and redemption keep shares close to the value of the underlying coins, while treasury stocks can drift well below their own stacks with no such mechanism. Saylor himself conceded the sector's fragility, warning that one weak company could damage trust across the whole category.

The Condition Still Missing: Investor Conviction

COINOTAG's reading of the primary record, Saylor's own posts, is that the claim treats competition as accretive and departs from strict bitcoin maximalism by making the credit wrapper, not the coin alone, the value-add. The condition furthest from being met is investor conviction: with only four of the top 20 treasury stocks trading above the value of their coins, most of the category already prices its holdings at a discount, and Saylor's own warning about weak issuers marks the same gap. Until SATA and STRC buyers start pricing the category as one system rather than firm by firm, the mutual-endorsement thesis stays a thesis.