In recent months, billionaire bitcoin investor Michael Saylor tried to convince Microsoft to use some of its more than $78.42 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet to buy bitcoin.
The strategy has been a lucrative one for Saylor and the company he co-founded, MicroStrategy. The company’s stock price has risen more than 410% this year, with the company holding about 423,650 bitcoins as of Dec. 8, holdings worth upwards of $42.3 billion as bitcoin trades around $100,000. MicroStrategy acquired those holdings at an aggregate price of roughly $26.5 billion, according to the company.
That balance sheet approach is now headed into the Nasdaq 100 and the major ETFs that track it, such as the Invesco QQQ, with MicroStrategy to the tech-heavy index on Dec. 23.
However, Saylor’s attempt to convince Microsoft and its shareholders to convert cash flows, dividends, buybacks and debt into bitcoin — he was backing conservative think tank The Free Enterprise Project, which submitted the shareholder proposal at Microsoft and has submitted a similar proposal to Amazon — did not come close to passing. Just 0.55% of votes at the company’s annual meeting on Dec. 10 supported the plan. Microsoft, as well as proxy advisors Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, had all suggested shareholders reject the proposal ahead of the vote.
The more conservative stance of corporations and their shareholders even as bitcoin surges is reflected in the latest CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey, released Thursday. Asked their view about bitcoin, 78% of respondents to the survey said bitcoin is a highly speculative asset class, while only 7% said it is a credible store of value.
But crypto is making some progress among CFOs when it comes to the general level of acceptance. Notably, 11% of CFOs in the Q4 survey said bitcoin is a fraud, a significant decrease compared to previous CNBC CFO Council surveys where that question was asked.
In 2017, 28% of CFOs said it was a fraud. In 2021, 19% said it was a fraud when asked the same question.
The percentage of respondents who held no view of bitcoin — fraud, store of value, or speculative asset class — declined from 30% in 2017 to just 4% in this latest survey.
The quarterly CNBC CFO Council survey reflects a sampling of views from chief finance officers across the market and sectors, with 27 respondents included in the Q4 survey, conducted December 9–December 16.
There are three publicly traded companies that hold more than 10,000 bitcoin, according to the bitcoin tracking website Bitcoin Treasuries. — MicroStrategy, Marathon Digital, and Riot Platforms. Other crypto industry companies, like Coinbase and Block, also disclose crypto holdings.
However, there are very few non-crypto-focused public companies that disclose any holding — Tesla, which bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin in 2021, being one of the lone exceptions — despite bitcoin’s price surge this year as well as its growing focus across the political landscape.
Microsoft is ahead of many companies in its crypto deliberations. It said in an October proxy filing that its treasury and investment services team previously evaluated bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fund the company’s operations and reduce economic risk, adding that it “continues to monitor trends and developments related to cryptocurrencies to inform future decision making.”
The company also noted at its annual meeting that it started accepting cryptocurrency for customer payments in 2014.
The overwhelming majority of respondents to the CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey said their company neither holds bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, nor accepts either as a form of payment.
It is unclear how much this corporate strategy will shift based on the actions of the Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump made several pro-crypto campaign promises, including advocating for the establishment of a national strategic bitcoin reserve, something that the Texas House of Representatives is now also pushing for.
“We’re gonna do something great with crypto because we don’t want China, or anybody else … but others are embracing it, and we want to be ahead,” Trump told CNBC’s Jim Cramer at the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month, responding to a question about a potential strategic bitcoin reserve.
In an appearance on CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Monday, Saylor continued to advocate for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and called for the U.S. government to allow U.S. banks and corporations to issue a token backed by the U.S. dollar.
“The great opportunity in the United States is to issue the world’s reserve digital currency,” he said.
