MicroStrategy Lost $13 Billion During DotCom Bubble – Could History Repeat Itself?

Last Updated on 28 February 2021 by CryptoTips.eu


Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / jeroen@cryptotips.eu

Just before the pandemic hit, British prime minister Boris Johnson gave a lot of interviews on his hobbies, in particular the weird habit he had of painting boxes to look like buses. The story quickly went viral and by now, if you type into the search engine Boris Johnson buses, you will less likely be referred to the fact that he once campaigned for Brexit with a bus which had some falsehoods on it, but rather to the fact that he has a hobby involving buses.

Many have since understood that Johnson tried to skew the search engine’s algorithm and downplay any negative news coverage. For example, he also repeated multiple times that he was the “model of restraint”, and because of this, it is now harder to find the stories detailing his alleged affair with former model Jennifer Arcuri, which became less visible in search results for Boris Johnson model.

DotCom crisis

Another person who would rather forget about history seems to be MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor (who just last week invested a second billion dollars of his company directly into Bitcoin). Even though he is now a here to the cryptosphere, it was remarkable that when someone reminded him of his company’s performance during the DotCom crisis, he immediately proceeded with instablock as they call it.

For those of you too young to remember, the DotCom crash took place during the first two years of the current century.

After investors had piled money onto new technology companies and anyone able to create a promising website, it all came crashing down and the tech markets lost 78% from their top in March 2000 until the bottom almost two years later. The most famous exploit was the money paid for the website Pets.com.

Fortune ranked the biggest loser investors of that bubble and the one who came out on top was none other than Mr Saylor himself.

As contrarian investor CryptoWhale reminded all his followers this week:

In 2001, Fortune Magazine published a list of the top losers of the Tech Bubble. Ranked #1 was none other than Michael Saylor, who had a whopping $13.53 Billion LOSS! MicroStrategy’s shares went from $3300 to $4 (-99.99% decline), and SEC even accused him of fraud.

We’ve looked it up, and even Newsweek features a story on the man called confessions of a crash from back in 2001. To his credit, Saylor was 35 and has probably learned a lot in the past two decades.

Be that as it may, Saylor reacted with blocking CryptoWhale from seeing any of his future tweets. We sure hope that MicroStrategy has learned from past mistakes and that his Bitcoin investment will turn out differently.

As always, time will tell.