/biz/ - Business & Finance

Just look at the stock price since it was offered publicly. The fact he's used bitcoin and leverage to push the stock price higher doesn't matter unless you're looking to trade on it. But then if you were going to trade it, why not just trade bitcoin, as that's likely to hold its value better if you didn't get out in time and probably offer you better volatility as well.

There are plenty of public companies that do these manipulations and shady stuff. I remember 'Riot', a microcap that was already scammy, decided to put blockchain in its name and announce they're going to do things like Bitcoin mining. You announce that at the right time, of course their stock price is going to go up. Then it doesn't matter if they never even mine a single bitcoin (in NYC of all places!) you can just sell off some of your stock at a profit and it doesn't matter what happens to the meme company.

And of course, we see the same thing with MicroStrategy:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-08/microstrategy-executives-sold-stock-after-bitcoin-s-summer-swoon

Now Saylor also doesn't have to actually sell. He could for example just borrow against his personal stock holdings, with that as say 50% collateral. You do so when the price is nice and inflated, you now have a shitload of money. Invest it into actual assets, like real estate, whatever you want. The stock price collapses, the lender takes your collateral stock... who cares? Especially if it was crashing hard, they're doing the selling of it for you. You could probably argue some bullshit like you still 'believed' in Bitcoin and the company all the way to bankruptcy. And I reckon this is also why he's so over the top optimistic, it's not just a confidence trick, he has to stay consistent in claiming that he really believed in his company and Bitcoin really was going as high as it was, etc.

tl;dr scammy people have been playing games with publicly traded stocks and fools and their money are soon parted.