Hedge fund manager Mark Spiegel, who is best known as a major Tesla short-seller, has issued a bearish warning about high-flying business intelligence firm MicroStrategy.
In a Thursday social media post, Spiegel opined that Michael Saylor, the charismatic co-founder of MicroStrategy, is “like the Hunt Brothers in the silver market.”
“One day he’s going to want to unload all the Bitcoin and realize that he was ‘the market,'” Spiegel warned.
Nelson Bunker Hunt, the eldest son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, famously tried to corner the silver market together with his two brothers (William Herbert Hunt and Lamar Hunt).
With the help of wealthy Saudi Arabian sheiks and other lenders, Hunt started buying the precious metal in droves. By January 1980, the Hunt brothers already owned 150 million ounces of silver. Back then, the price of the commodity surged to $52 per troy ounce. They ended up controlling the majority of the privately held supply of silver.
However, speculators soon started taking their profit in silver after the gold price crashed. Banks that were helping speculators get on the hype train ended up calling in the loans due to President Jimmy Carter launching a credit squeeze.
The price of silver then collapsed on “Black Thursday” (March 27, 1980), with the Hunt syndicate losing as much as $2 billion in a single day.
After facing various lawsuits, the Hunt brothers ended up declaring bankruptcy in 1988.
As reported by U.Today, MicroStrategy recently announced that it plans to raise $42 billion in order to buy more Bitcoin.
As part of its ambitious fundraising goal, MicroStrategy is going to sell as much as $21 billion in shares, taking a page out of Tesla’s playbook.
Many Bitcoiners view this as a bullish development, but there are also some concerns about MicroStrategy making broader corporate adoption less attractive due to its massive holdings.