Saylor, MIT, and Bitcoin

From a scientific genius at MIT, to the "unluckiest man" who lost $6 billion in a single day during the dot-com bubble, to the current "high priest" of the Bitcoin world.

This is a story about mathematics, obsession, and redemption.

Act I: MIT's "Rocket Boy" and the Deferred Dream

On the MIT campus in 1983, Saylor was not the typical geek who spent all day in the lab. He was on a full scholarship, majoring in an extremely hardcore interdisciplinary field: Science, Technology, and Society.

His research focused on simulating complex systems. In an era when computers were still in their prehistoric age, Saylor was obsessed with using mathematical models to predict the laws of the world's operation. His dream at the time was very straightforward: to become an astronaut.

Reversal I: The Betrayal of the Medical Report

Just as he was about to complete his studies, a medical examination diagnosed him with a slight heart murmur. The door to the Air Force slammed shut, and his astronaut dream shattered instantly. This young man, who was originally destined to explore the stars and seas, was forced to remain on Earth. But he took with him the ultimate weapon MIT taught him—the laws of thermodynamics. His later understanding of Bitcoin all stemmed from what he learned at MIT: energy, entropy increase, and structural strength.

Act II: The Carnival and Hell of MicroStrategy

At the age of 24, Saylor founded MicroStrategy based on the data modeling skills he honed at MIT. His logic was simple: businesses need to "predict the future" through data.

By age 35, he was already a darling of Wall Street, worth tens of billions. However, in March 2000, the dot-com bubble burst.

Reversal II: The Record Holder for Single-Day Losses

Due to accounting rule adjustments and a plummeting stock price, Saylor lost $6 billion in just 24 hours. This was the highest record for personal single-day losses in human history at the time. He went from a tech superstar to a cautionary tale. For the next decade, he disappeared from the mainstream view, and the company entered a long period of mediocrity.

Act III: Bitcoin—The "Escape Pod" in Thermodynamic Terms

Fast forward to 2020, as the pandemic swept the globe, the Federal Reserve began printing money frantically.

Looking at the hundreds of millions of dollars in cash on the company's books, Saylor felt a phenomenon he had studied in the MIT lab: energy was draining away. He believed that if you hold fiat currency that depreciates by more than 15% annually, you are not holding an asset, but a block of ice constantly melting under the midsummer sun.

He began frantically searching for a substance that would not "melt."

Reversal III: From Skeptic to "Believer"

Interestingly, in 2013, Saylor had tweeted: "Bitcoin's days are numbered. It will follow the path of online gambling."

But in 2020, after 1,000 hours of in-depth research, he announced to the board: We are going to convert all the company's cash into Bitcoin. Not only that, he later borrowed money by issuing bonds to buy more. He applied the engineering principles he learned at MIT to Bitcoin: Bitcoin is "digital energy," a perfect system in thermodynamic terms, with no loss, never rusting.

Act IV: The Lonely Gamble—Pressure, Ridicule, and Dark Times

If the 2020 purchase was a high-stakes gamble, then the subsequent years from 2021 to 2023 were the longest "deep-sea dive" of Saylor's life.

When Bitcoin fell from its high of $69,000 all the way to $15,000, ridicule from the entire society surged towards him like a tsunami. Mainstream financial media even had his second bankruptcy obituary ready, with headlines almost identical: "The man who lost $6 billion in 2000 is leading his company towards the cliff again."

Those were two years of extreme pressure for him:

• Institutional Abandonment: Wall Street analysts continuously downgraded MicroStrategy's rating, saying it was no longer a software company but a leveraged "suicidal hedge fund."
• The Shadow of Liquidation: As the coin price plummeted, rumors about him facing a "margin call" leading to company bankruptcy spread like wildfire on social media every day.
• Public Humiliation: Every time he gave an interview, the host's eyes carried a kind of pity reserved for a "cult leader."

Facing all this, Saylor displayed a chilling calm. On that famous Twitter account, he still posted daily mathematical deductions about Bitcoin, never showing a hint of wavering or justification. He once privately told a friend: "If you truly understand the second law of thermodynamics, you wouldn't doubt the existence of gravity because of a storm."

This pressure was not only financial but also the ultimate test of a person's intellectual dignity. He locked himself in a digital fortress, enduring the noise of the whole world, until the market finally caught up with his logic again.