“Choose your Fighter,” Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor asserted on X (formerly Twitter) on Apr. 18.
Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), rebranded to Strategy, emphasized the astonishingly high return of 2,466% offered by his firm since August 2020, when it began acquiring Bitcoin. He called it the “BSE return.”
The Bitcoin Standard Era, or BSE, is a conceptual metric introduced by Strategy that refers to the period since Aug. 10, 2020, when the firm adopted Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset — the first U.S. public company to do so. It’s a grandstanding way of telling everyone that the company operates on the Bitcoin standard.
The BSE return calculates how much Strategy’s stock has grown in value since Aug. 10, 2020. The MSTR stock opened at $12.34 on Aug. 10, 2020, and closed at $317.20 on Apr. 17, 2025, a return of over 2,400%.
In contrast, all the Magnificent Seven stocks stood far behind MSTR with NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) at 808%, Elon Musk’s Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) at 155%, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) at 105%, Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) at 91%, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) at 77%, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) at 75%, and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) at 10%.
Meanwhile, Coinbase Global (Nasdaq: COIN) that debuted with the open price of $381 on Apr. 14, 2021, closed at $175.02 on Apr. 17, 2025, reflecting a decline of more than 50%. Coinbase is the leading crypto exchange in the U.S.
Strategy is the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin and is well known for its aggressive Bitcoin acquisition strategy. As of now, the firm holds 531,644 BTC worth $44.94 billion.
Saylor is a strong Bitcoin bull and has predicted that the cryptocurrency will hit the price of $13 million in 20 years.
However, Bitcoin itself offered a return of 614% since August 2020 and was trading at $84,537.58 at press time as per Kraken’s price feed.
