Billionaires who have plowed their fortunes into publicly traded crypto companies Coinbase Global and MicroStrategy have sold a combined total of about $850 million worth of stock over the past nine months.
MicroStrategy Chairman and CEO Michael Saylor speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, Friday, July 26, 2024. Photo by Liam Kennedy/Bloomberg
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According to regulatory filings, Michael Saylor, founder and CEO of software company MicroStrategy, which is heavily invested in bitcoin, has sold $362 million worth of MicroStrategy shares since the beginning of 2024. Brian Armstrong and Fred Ersam, co-founders of Coinbase, the most popular U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, sold $216 million and $270 million worth of Coinbase shares, respectively, between November and late July last year.
The selloff coincided with a surge in the prices of some cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency and industry benchmark, is trading at about $70,000, more than double what it was a year ago. The total value of all cryptocurrencies in circulation is about $2.6 trillion, up from $1.1 trillion a year ago, according to CoinGecko.
Spokespeople for Coinbase and Armstrong declined to comment, while Ehrsam and Saylor did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Saylor, who founded MicroStrategy in the 1990s, sold 390,000 shares in the first four months of 2024. He acquired the shares at $121 a share by exercising option grants that expired at the end of April. Mr. Saylor sold the shares for an average price of $1,147. Mr. Saylor still owns 2 million shares, or 11% of the company. MicroStrategy shares closed Monday at $1,684, and have doubled in value since the start of the year and are up 300% in the past 12 months.
Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, is the company's largest individual shareholder with a 15% stake. The 1.1 million shares Armstrong sold since November were less than 4% of his stake in the company. He announced plans in October 2022 to sell some of his holdings to fund “scientific research” and invest in startups. Artham, who is a director of Coinbase and a general partner at venture capital firm Paradigm, owns a 4% stake in Coinbase. Coinbase shares closed at $234 on Monday, but are up more than 50% since the beginning of the year and nearly 600% since the second half of 2022. Armstrong and Artham have been selling their shares through an automated trading plan, and began selling large chunks of shares several times a month starting last November.
MicroStrategy's quarterly revenue of $115 million was down slightly from the first quarter of last year. However, according to its latest quarterly report, MicroStrategy now holds 214,278 Bitcoin (worth about $15 billion), making it one of the largest Bitcoin holders. Coinbase's Q1 2024 revenue is $1.64 billion, more than double what it saw in Q1 2023.
The market recovery has boosted the founders' fortunes. Armstrong was worth an estimated $10.6 billion as of Friday's close, making him the 211th richest person in the world, according to Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List. Artham, who joined Coinbase as a co-founder in 2012 after seeing Armstrong's Reddit posts, is worth an estimated $3 billion.
Saylor, who founded MicroStrategy in the 1990s, has an estimated net worth of $4.9 billion, made up of MicroStrategy stock, his own significant Bitcoin holdings, and the proceeds from the sale of MicroStrategy stock. “It's pretty clear to me that Bitcoin is the future of capital, it's the future of money,” Saylor declared at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville last weekend. “It might make sense to get into Bitcoin.”
This article originally appeared on forbes.com and all figures are in U.S. dollars.
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