INTELLIGENCE · PERSON DOSSIER
UPDATED 2026-08-13Michael Saylor
Founders & CEOs
Strategy · United States
Net worth
$3.3bn
Stake in Strategy
19,989,255 shares — 6.1% of class A equivalent, 37.6% of total voting power
Base salary
$1 a year
Total reported compensation, 2025
$780,732
Personal bitcoin holding
17,732 BTC, bought for about $175m
Identity & Ownership
Current role
Founder and Executive Chairman, Strategy Inc
Strategy's own investor-relations biography records him as Executive Chairman since August 2022, founder of the company, and chairman of the board since he founded it in 1989. He is styled "Founder and Executive Chairman" in company results releases.
Born
4 February 1965, Lincoln, Nebraska
Strategy's official biography confirms he was born to a military family in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1965. The precise date of 4 February is carried by Wikipedia rather than a company or filing source.
Age
61
Age as listed on his Forbes billionaire profile.
Nationality
American
Forbes records his citizenship as the United States. Strategy's own biography describes him as "an American entrepreneur, executive, inventor, author, and philanthropist".
Based
Miami, Florida
Forbes lists Miami as his residence. Saylor has said publicly that "Florida remains my home today", a claim contested by the District of Columbia in its tax suit and settled in 2024 without any admission of residency.
Company
Strategy Inc (Nasdaq: MSTR), Tysons Corner, Virginia
Formerly MicroStrategy Incorporated. Class A common stock trades as MSTR on the Nasdaq Global Select Market alongside four listed preferred series (STRF, STRC, STRK, STRD) and STRE on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.
Board positions at Strategy
Chairman of the Board; Chair of the Investments Committee
The Investments Committee oversees acquisitions, disposals, pledges and management of the company's alternative assets, including bitcoin, and the implementation of its Treasury Reserve Policy. Saylor took the chair in August 2022 on becoming Executive Chairman; the committee is Saylor and Stephen Graham. In 2025 it did not meet but acted by unanimous written consent three times.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dual degrees in aeronautics and astronautics and in science, technology and society, 1987
Attended MIT from 1983 on a full Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship and graduated with highest honours in 1987. Wrote a thesis, "A Mathematical Model of a Renaissance Italian City State", while studying system dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Personal Wealth & Holdings
Net worth
$3.3bn
Forbes real-time estimate, source of wealth given as "Cryptocurrency, Self Made", ranking him #1304 in the world. Forbes valuations of this kind are estimates, not audited figures, and move with the bitcoin price and the MSTR share price.
Stake in Strategy
19,989,255 shares — 6.1% of class A equivalent, 37.6% of total voting power
Beneficial ownership as disclosed in the 2026 proxy statement, measured as of 1 April 2026. Comprises 372,575 class A shares and 19,616,680 class B shares. The class B holding is 99.9% of that class, which carries the super-voting rights that give him control disproportionate to his economic stake.
Base salary
$1 a year
His base salary was $1 as of 1 January 2024, 2025 and 2026. He receives no bonus and no equity awards; the company's proxy states his 2025 compensation consisted of "perquisites consisting principally of security and transportation-related benefits and associated tax gross-up payments".
Total reported compensation, 2025
$780,732
Comprising $1 of salary and $780,731 of other compensation. Comparable figures were $791,912 in 2024 and $799,670 in 2023. He received no stock or option awards in any of the three years.
Personal bitcoin holding
17,732 BTC, bought for about $175m
Disclosed by Saylor himself in October 2020 and carried by Forbes. He has made no comparable itemised public disclosure since, so the figure should be read as a 2020 snapshot rather than a current position. He has repeatedly said he has never sold any of it.
Giving vehicle
The Saylor Foundation, established 1999
Strategy's biography says the foundation has donated millions to children's health, refugee relief, education, environmental conservation and the arts, and runs Saylor.org, which offers free college-level and professional-development courses. The company states more than 2 million students have used it. Figures are self-reported.
Background
Commissioned Second Lieutenant, United States Air Force; served in the Air Force Reserve
Completed flight officer training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, and was commissioned on graduating from MIT in 1987. He attended MIT on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship. He grew up on US Air Force bases, his family settling near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Consulting on computer simulations at The Federal Group and DuPont, 1987–1989
Strategy's biography describes a consulting career "constructing computer simulations to support strategic decision-making at companies such as DuPont, Dow, and Exxon". Wikipedia dates the Federal Group role to 1987 and the DuPont internal-consultant role to 1988.
1989, aged 24, with fellow MIT graduate Sanju Bansal
Founded on the idea of applying computer simulation and graphical, client-server computing to enterprise decision-making. The company pioneered relational online analytical processing (ROLAP). Saylor met Bansal through the Theta Delta Chi fraternity at MIT.
Chief executive of MicroStrategy from 1989 to 2022
Thirty-three years as CEO, including taking the company public on Nasdaq in June 1998. He stepped into the Executive Chairman role on 8 August 2022, handing the chief executive job to Phong Le.
Named inventor on more than 48 patents
Self-reported in Strategy's official biography, which also credits him as the inventor of relational analytics and cites work in web, distributed, mobile and cloud analytics, mobile identity and IoT.
The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything (Perseus Books, 2012)
The book argued that mobile, cloud and social networks would reshape political and economic development and elevate Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google into transnational powers. Strategy says it appeared on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.
Alarm.com (Nasdaq: ALRM) and Angel.com
Strategy's biography credits him as creator and founder of Alarm.com, one of the first home automation and security companies, and of Angel.com, an early cloud-based interactive voice response provider sold to Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories for $110m in 2013. Both began inside MicroStrategy. Self-reported.
Settled SEC accounting-fraud charges in December 2000 without admitting or denying the allegations
He disgorged $8,280,000, paid a $350,000 civil penalty and consented to a permanent injunction against violating the antifraud and record-keeping provisions of the federal securities laws. The action followed MicroStrategy's restatement of its 1997–1999 accounts.
Heavily self-published bitcoin advocate who fronts the company's evangelism programme
Strategy runs a dedicated "Bitcoin for Corporations" strand at its annual World conference, with Saylor as the headline voice, and publishes his keynotes and interviews on its own site. The 2022 edition opened with a session between Saylor and Jack Dorsey. Most of his primary-source output is company press releases, keynote video and his own social posts rather than bylined journalism.
840,447 BTC, bought for an aggregate $63.36bn at an average of $75,385 a coin
Reported in Strategy's Form 8-K filed 10 August 2026, as of 9 August 2026. In the week to 9 August the company sold 1,690 BTC for $108.6m at an average of $64,262 — below its average cost — to fund repurchases of STRC preferred stock. Holdings figures move weekly; always read them with the filing date.
Notable Coverage
22 items
Strategy sells bitcoin below its average cost to buy back preferred stock
Strategy posts an $8.22bn quarterly loss as bitcoin falls
Saylor said the company continued "to evolve our business model and establish Digital Credit as a new asset class" through a phase of "muted bitcoin sentiment and market skepticism".
Strategy joins eight firms funding Bitcoin's long-term security
Strategy adopts a Digital Credit Capital Framework and authorises bitcoin sales
Saylor said Strategy "remains committed to Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset" but that "Digital Credit requires liquidity, discipline, and active capital management".
Saylor keeps a $1 salary and takes no equity award
Strategy reports 713,502 bitcoins and $25.3bn raised in 2025
MSCI declines to exclude digital asset treasury companies from its indexes
Legal name changes from MicroStrategy Incorporated to Strategy Inc
MicroStrategy rebrands as Strategy with a bitcoin logo
MicroStrategy joins the Nasdaq-100
Saylor and MicroStrategy settle the DC tax suit for $40m
Saylor said: "Florida remains my home today, and I continue to dispute the allegation that I was ever a resident of the District of Columbia. I have agreed to settle this matter to avoid the continued burdens of the litigation on friends, family, and myself."
District of Columbia sues Saylor and MicroStrategy over unpaid income tax
Saylor disputed the allegations, saying Florida was his home and that he had never been a District resident.
Saylor gives up the chief executive role after 33 years
MacroStrategy borrows $205m against bitcoin to buy more bitcoin
Saylor turns the annual conference into a corporate bitcoin evangelism platform
Board adopts bitcoin as the company's primary treasury reserve asset
Holdings reach 38,250 bitcoins for $425m after a second purchase
MicroStrategy buys 21,454 bitcoins for $250m, the first such move by a listed US company
Saylor publishes The Mobile Wave
SEC settles accounting-fraud charges against Saylor for $8.63m
Saylor settled without admitting or denying the Commission's allegations.