Michael Saylor has built a career on positions taken with uncommon conviction. The co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy spent the first three decades of his career building business intelligence software. In 2020, he made decisions that repositioned him as one of the most discussed figures in the technology world.
Early Life and MIT Education
Born in 1965 in Nebraska, Saylor received a scholarship to MIT where he studied aerospace engineering and the history of science. He graduated in 1987 and co-founded MicroStrategy in 1989, building data analytics software that helped enterprises extract insights from large datasets — a concept genuinely ahead of its time in the earliest days of commercial internet.
Building MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy went public in 1998 and became a prominent software company of the late 1990s technology expansion. After an accounting restatement in 2000, the company spent two decades rebuilding its business intelligence platform into a respected enterprise software provider with a global customer base.
A Decisive Strategic Pivot
In August 2020, Saylor announced that MicroStrategy had placed a substantial portion of its corporate treasury into Bitcoin as a long-term store of value. He described the decision as a response to concerns about monetary inflation and the long-term purchasing power of cash held in traditional reserves. The announcement drew immediate attention across the financial and technology press.
Saylor became one of the most visible advocates for treating Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset, combining macroeconomic analysis with technology history in a distinctive public communication style. His position — held publicly and consistently — has made him one of the more recognisable technology executives of his generation, and one of the more debated.