Charlie Munger Hasn’t Taken the Time to Study Bitcoin: MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor

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Charlie Munger and other elite Western business leaders are continually prodded for their opinion on bitcoin (BTC), but they haven’t had the time to study it, said MicroStrategy (MSTR) Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, appearing on CNBC one day after his company’s fourth-quarter earnings results.

Saylor said he is “sympathetic” to Munger’s broad crypto criticisms, and he called out the thousands of nonbitcoin tokens as little more than avenues for “gambling.”

However, said Saylor, “If [Munger] were a business leader in South America or Africa or Asia and he spent 100 hours studying the problem, he would be more bullish on bitcoin than I am.”

The “plight of the common man,” said Saylor, is better illustrated by recent events in Lebanon, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Venezuela – where local currencies have plunged in value.

Saylor’s appearance Friday morning came one day after his company booked a Q4 impairment charge of $197.6 million on its bitcoin holdings, which now total 132,500 bitcoins.

Already a bull on MicroStrategy, Canaccord Genuity upped its price target on the stock to $400 from $372 following the earnings news. “We believe the company’s relatively conservative strategy of keeping most of its holdings unencumbered has been prudent,” wrote analyst Joseph Vafi and team. “Institutional investors are continuing to work on their bitcoin and overall digital-asset strategies, in our view. As such, we expect to see continued mainstream adoption, which we believe bodes well for the medium term and supports our view that BTC is biased higher over time.”

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Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk’s co-regional news chief, Americas. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.

Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk’s co-regional news chief, Americas. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.