Michael Saylor Says Strategy Stock Has Gained 52% to 53% a Year and Bitcoin 38%. Since Its First Bitcoin Buy in August 2020, the Numbers Are 48% and 36%

Michael Saylor was asked on Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend why bitcoin hasn’t yet benefited from his scarcity argument. He answered with a scorecard. The clock starts, he said, “when we bought our first Bitcoin in August of 2020.” StrategyMSTR, then called MicroStrategy, announced on Aug. 11, 2020 that it had bought 21,454 bitcoin for $250 million.

Since then, Saylor said, bitcoin and his company’s stock have beaten nearly everything else:

He added: “The only stock you know of that’s outperforming that is Nvidia. Every other Mag 7 stock and every all the other major S&P stocks are underperforming that.” We ran the numbers from the Aug. 10, 2020 close, the last one before the first purchase was announced, through the Oct. 27, 2026 close, using total returns that include dividends.

The Numbers Are Lower, the Ranking Holds

Strategy stock returned 48.0% a year over that stretch, not 52% or 53%. Bitcoin returned 36.2% a year, not 38%. On the day Saylor’s interview aired, Oct. 16, the figures were 47.5% and 36.6%, so they were already below his numbers then.

His figures were true recently. Strategy’s annualized return was at 52% or higher as late as Oct. 6, and bitcoin’s was at 38% or higher as late as Oct. 4. That shows how fast these averages move. Strategy’s annualized gain was about 60% at the start of 2026, fell to about 38% at its June 26 low and then climbed back.

The ranking Saylor described does hold up. NvidiaNVDA returned 61.5% a year and turned $1 into $19.63, ahead of Strategy’s $11.44. No other Magnificent Seven stock came close to either. Alphabet led the rest at 26.6% a year, and bitcoin’s 36.2% beat all six of them. The S&P 500, through the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, returned 15.9% a year.

“Every Year” Is an Average

Saylor’s “every year” describes an average. Bitcoin fell 64.3% in 2022 and 6.3% in 2025, and it was down 7.7% this year as of Oct. 27. Strategy stock lost 74.0% in 2022 and 47.5% in 2025. The big gains came in 2023 and 2024, when the stock rose 346% and 358%.

Saylor’s numbers, checked

Timing matters a lot for anyone who bought later. Strategy closed at $141.40 on Oct. 27, 70.2% below its record close of $473.83 on Nov. 20, 2024. Bitcoin, at about $80,800, is well below the record it set in October 2025. A year later, Tom Lee called the cycle bottom.

Gold and the Rest of the Field

One part of Saylor’s answer doesn’t check out. “Bitcoin is outperforming gold. Gold is uh outperforming the S&P index,” he said. Bitcoin did beat gold. But the SPDR Gold Shares fund, which tracks the metal, returned 11.4% a year from Aug. 10, 2020, behind the S&P 500’s 15.9%.

The order at the top has changed in the past year. Measured from the same Aug. 10, 2020 start through Oct. 27, 2025, Strategy led the whole field at 83.9% a year, ahead of Nvidia’s 72.6%, and bitcoin was at 54.3%. A year of losses for both since then pulled Strategy to 48.0% and into second place.

The whole field

A year ago, Strategy led the field. Nvidia has since passed it.

Annualized return, including dividends, from Aug. 10, 2020 through Oct. 27, 2025 and through Oct. 27, 2026. Saylor said 38% for bitcoin and 52% or 53% for Strategy.

The lower half of the field is crowded with household names. AmazonAMZN returned 7.9% a year, the weakest of the group, and Meta PlatformsMETA returned 15.0%, slightly behind the S&P 500.

What to Watch

Strategy said it would report third-quarter results on Oct. 29. Its latest weekly filing shows it held about 848,517 bitcoin as of Oct. 25, bought at an average of about $75,446 each, so the stack was only modestly above cost with bitcoin near $80,800. It made no bitcoin purchases from Oct. 19 to Oct. 25. Bitcoin’s slide has been steep: it was down 33% over the year as of Oct. 11.

The annualized numbers will keep moving with every close. A long stretch of flat prices would pull both averages lower, while one strong month can lift them back toward Saylor’s figures.