Strategy Executive Chair Michael Saylor on Tuesday threw cold water on claims that the company would liquidate its Bitcoin holdings if the flagship cryptocurrency continues to plummet.
Saylor has tied the fate of Strategy to Bitcoin by selling equity and debt in the company to amass 714,644 tokens at an average purchase price of $76,056. With Bitcoin sitting below $70,000 —down sharply from its October all-time high of about $126,000—Saylor remains comfortable in the company’s ability to pay its obligations.
“If Bitcoin falls 90% for the next four years, we’ll refinance the debt,” Saylor said on CNBC, adding that banks will continue to lend to the company because they see the value in Bitcoin’s volatility.
A growing number of investors are hoping Bitcoin’s fall continues—and that Strategy goes down with it.
Short interest in Strategy has jumped about 40% from a low point in September 2025, according to an analysis Tuesday from S3 Partners. The 30.5 million shares sold short now represent roughly 10% of the stock’s public float. Long investors have also fled the stock. Strategy shares have plunged about 71% to $133 from a 52-week high of $455.90 last July.
“Short sellers are increasingly focused on Strategy’s funding model pressures,” the S3 team concluded.
Strategy didn’t immediately respond to Barron’s request for comment.
The majority of the short interest in Strategy before September was a hedge against the company’s $8.2 billion in convertible debt, S3 estimates. Short sellers were primarily limiting downside risk involved in owning the debt. Others, like Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates, tried to pull off arbitrage strategies by buying Bitcoin and shorting Strategy, which at times traded at a wide premium to the value of its underlying assets.
That situation has changed, S3 says. The new shorts are more direct bets against Strategy and the price of Bitcoin itself. S3 estimates that convertible-arbitrage shorts have declined by roughly 2.5 million to 5 million shares since mid-September, while total short interest has risen by about 9.2 million shares.
Trying to assign an exact reason to Bitcoin’s collapse can be a fool’s errand, but one risk increasingly cited by short sellers is the rise of quantum computing, S3 said. As Barron’s reported in August, ultrapowerful quantum computers could eventually crack blockchain security protocols, potentially undermining investor confidence in cryptocurrencies.
“If quantum developments are viewed as negative for Bitcoin, investors can count on recurring catalysts as the technology advances,” the S3 team wrote.
Saylor may continue to buy up Bitcoin and even restructure Strategy’s debt—rolling it further into the future—if the selloff continues. As long as Strategy shares fall alongside Bitcoin, Wall Street’s expanding cohort of short sellers stands to profit.
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