Strategy CEO Phong Le addresses shareholder concerns on stock performance

Phong Le, the chief executive of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), is making the company’s investment thesis explicit for shareholders who have watched the stock drift while Bitcoin has marched higher. In a recent Q&A session, Le laid out a clear framework: the metric that matters most is not the stock price today, but Bitcoin per share, or BPS, the amount of Bitcoin exposure that each share of MSTR delivers over time.

The pitch is essentially that MSTR is a leveraged bet on Bitcoin, and leverage cuts both ways. When Bitcoin rises, the argument goes, MSTR should rise faster. That compounding mechanism depends entirely on the company’s ability to keep accumulating Bitcoin per share, which Le framed as the central mission.

Why BPS matters more than the share price

Think of BPS like earnings per share for a traditional company, except instead of profit, the numerator is Bitcoin. If Strategy can grow the Bitcoin sitting behind each share faster than dilution shrinks it, shareholders end up with more Bitcoin exposure per dollar invested than they could get by buying Bitcoin directly.

That framing explains why Le is not rushing to buy back common stock or issue dividends, moves that would reward shareholders today but reduce the capital available for Bitcoin acquisition. The company is prioritizing its STRC digital credit product instead, a perpetual preferred instrument designed to generate proceeds that fund further Bitcoin purchases over a horizon Le put at four to ten years.

STRC is essentially a new layer in Strategy’s capital stack. Positioned as a stability-oriented instrument, it targets a trading range near par, around $99 to $100, making it attractive to investors who want some connection to the Bitcoin ecosystem without taking on the full volatility of holding the cryptocurrency outright.

Le’s sequencing is important. He said the priority right now is to stabilize the digital credit business before the company turns its full attention back to maximizing MSTR equity value.

The balance sheet backstop

Strategy currently holds USD reserves estimated between $4.65B and $4.8B, a cushion that covers operations, preferred dividends, and opportunistic Bitcoin purchases without forcing the company to sell equity at unfavorable prices.

Le joined MicroStrategy in 2015 as CFO, later took on the COO role, and was appointed President and CEO in 2022. He has watched the company’s Bitcoin-first strategy evolve from a controversial accounting experiment under co-founder Michael Saylor into what is now a structured capital markets operation with multiple funding instruments.

What this means for investors

The four-to-ten year timeline Le cited reflects the structural reality of building a new credit market from scratch. STRC needs buyers, secondary market liquidity, and a track record before it can serve as a reliable, large-scale funding mechanism.

The risk is that Bitcoin does not cooperate with the timeline. If the cryptocurrency enters an extended bear market while Strategy is still building out its credit infrastructure, BPS growth stalls, the STRC trading range becomes harder to defend, and the reserves get consumed by operations and preferred dividends faster than new capital comes in. Le acknowledged that MSTR is designed to outperform Bitcoin in an upmarket, which implicitly means it is also likely to underperform in a downmarket.

Shareholders who came into MSTR expecting a near-term re-rating or a buyback program got a different answer from Le: the company is building something that takes years to pay off, and the payoff is denominated in Bitcoin exposure per share, not quarterly earnings beats.

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