‘Preying on investors’: how software firm MicroStrategy’s big bet on bitcoin went stratospheric

Company's share price has risen twentyfold after it changed its strategy to become first bitcoin treasury company'

In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure US software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of software as a service" was not racy enough.

Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250m in alternative assets - stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types".