Michael Saylor Pitched Bitcoin To ’Every’ Middle East Sovereign Wealth Fund - Here’s Why It Matters
Michael Saylor just revealed he's taken the Bitcoin gospel to the most powerful financial institutions on the planet. The MicroStrategy founder confirmed he's pitched the digital asset to every major sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East—the very entities managing trillions in petrodollars.
The Sovereign Shift
This isn't about retail FOMO. This is about institutional capital at the sovereign level making a strategic pivot. Saylor's roadshow signals a profound shift: nation-states are now seriously evaluating Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, not just a speculative tech toy. The pitch? Digital property, inflation resistance, and a hedge against monetary debasement—concepts that resonate when you're sitting on oil wealth that faces long-term structural challenges.
Follow the Money (and the Power)
When sovereign wealth funds move, markets bend. Their allocation decisions can create tidal waves of capital flow. A single, modest percentage allocation from one of these giants would dwarf the current buying pressure from public corporations and ETFs combined. It's the ultimate validation for Bitcoin's store-of-value thesis—moving from Wall Street memes to the balance sheets of nations.
The new financial arms race isn't about who has the most gold; it's about who has the most sound money. And for the funds built on fossil fuels, diversifying into a digital, finite asset might be the smartest hedge they ever make—even if it feels like betting against the very hydrocarbon economy that created their wealth. A cynical take? It's the ultimate irony: oil money buying the antidote to the fiat system it helped fuel.
Inside Saylor’s Bitcoin Talks With Sovereign Funds
Saylor used this as a template for the Middle East, explaining that he has been on an intensive tour of the region’s power centers. “I’ve been meeting with all the sovereign wealth funds. I’ve been meeting with, I don’t know, 50, 100 different investors, hedge funds, family office investors… I’ve been meeting with regulators in every jurisdiction.” His message is “very, very straightforward”: “We now have digital capital. Bitcoin is digital capital, is digital gold. On top of digital capital, we have a new asset class called digital credit. Digital credit strips the volatility from the capital and provides yield, income.”
To illustrate the appeal, he contrasted capital and credit. Giving a child $1 million of Manhattan land is pure capital with no cash flow. “Or you can give them a credit instrument that pays them $10,000 a month forever, starting now. And so most people want the credit instrument. They don’t want the capital instrument… They’d rather have 10% non-volatile than 30% volatile with no cash flows.” Treasury companies like MicroStrategy and Metaplanet “exist to convert capital into credit.”
Saylor then laid out the blueprint for any ambitious bank in the region: “Have the bank custody Bitcoin. Everybody talks about self-custody. Self-custody for the bank in the country. Buy Bitcoin, have your bank custody the Bitcoin, and then start to offer credit networks on top of the Bitcoin.” If a national bank extends loans such as “SOFR plus 50 basis point loans on Bitcoin,” he argued, then as Bitcoin’s market grows from $2 trillion to $20 trillion, that bank could attract “5% or 10% of it,” pulling in “a trillion dollars or a few trillion dollars” simply because “most big conventional regulated banks don’t handle Bitcoin.”
The “biggest idea” is to turn Bitcoin-backed credit into a bank account that outcompetes the entire global deposit system. By taking digital credit instruments like Stretch or Mars, placing them in a fund that is mostly credit with a currency buffer and reserve layer, Saylor envisions a regulated account that pays around 8% with “vol of zero.” In that setup, “I wire you my billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars, and you pay me 8% interest every day, zero vol, in a regulated bank, powered by digital credit, which is in turn powered by a treasury company with 5x as much digital capital, over-collateralized.”
In such a regime, he argued, “you could presumably attract 20 trillion dollars or 50 trillion dollars.” For depositors, “the perfect product is a bank account with zero volatility that pays you 400 basis points more than the risk-free rate in your favorite currency.” For Saylor, that account is “the lightsaber of money, the laser BEAM of money, the nuclear fusion reactor of money.”
He framed it as an open race: “The question is, who wants to be the Switzerland of the 21st century and attract all the money in the world?” In his view, “the answer is going to be whoever appreciates money the most, wants the money the most, that understands technology the best, that is willing to take a courageous stance of conviction with a degree of clarity,” he said.
He concluded: “That is the opportunity, and all the conversations have been extraordinarily energetic, enthusiastic, and I couldn’t be more excited. I think it will happen somewhere in this region. We’ll see where.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $90,164.
