Michael Saylor’s Strategy said it will register an unrealized $5.9 billion loss in the first quarter after adopting an accounting change that requires valuing the digital asset at market prices. 

Shares of the dot-com-era software maker turned leveraged Bitcoin proxy formerly known as MicroStrategy fell as much as 14% on Monday. Earlier, Bitcoin wiped out almost all of its gains since Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election win in early November.

Strategy and fellow corporate buyers of Bitcoin are being made to recognize the unrealized changes that often produce big swings in earnings or, in the case of Strategy last quarter, losses. Strategy waited until the first quarter to adopt the accounting change that was approved last year. 

Prior to the accounting change, the Tysons Corner, Virginia-based company has been classifying its Bitcoin holdings as intangible assets—similar to brand recognition or trademarks. That designation forced Strategy to permanently mark down the value of its holdings when the price of Bitcoin dropped. Gains could only be recognized when tokens are sold, which Saylor has vowed not to do, even saying his digital wallet keys should be burned when he dies.   

Part of the first-quarter loss will actually result from Saylor’s recent spending binge, which has produced roughly $1 billion of paper losses on the $7.79 billion the company spent on Bitcoin in 2025, according to Bloomberg calculations. The company owned $41.8 billion of Bitcoin coming into the year, an amount that fell by nearly $5 billion in the first quarter with the 12% drop in the price of the tokens. That equates to about $6 billion of “mark-to-market” losses, according to Bloomberg calculations as of March 31, before taxes.

At the same time, the company’s retained earnings will whipsaw into positive territory, courtesy of a nearly $13 billion boost from the new accounting, according to Bloomberg calculations. 

Strategy became the first public company to buy Bitcoin as a capital allocation strategy in 2020, with co-founder and chairman Saylor saying the enterprise software firm needed to embrace the policy to survive. It grabbed the attention of Wall Street as the shares took off with speculators using it as a proxy for the digital currency. 

Saylor took advantage of the surging demand to sell more shares to purchase additional Bitcoin, eventually expanding to convertible debt and preferred shares offerings to fuel the buying spree. The stock is up more than 2,200% since the start of August 2020. 

Hedge funds have been driving some of the demand for the convertible debt, as they seek out Strategy for trades that incorporate buying the bonds and selling the shares short, essentially betting on the underlying stock’s volatility.

With the price of Bitcoin faltering along with other risky asset this year, the meteoric appreciation in the value of Strategy’s shares has also slowed. And last week, Strategy’s shares got their only sell rating after boutique equity research firm Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. cut its view on the firm, saying the market for the securities used to fund the Bitcoin purchases is increasingly saturated.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Disney heiress Abigail Disney is calling for a tax on the richest people in the U.S., saying it’s crazy for billionaires to hold onto their wealth. Disney is also a major philanthropist who’s donated tens of millions of dollars over the years. She’s among a group of ultra-wealthy individuals who have made a commitment to give away their vast fortunes.

While many of the world’s wealthiest people make an effort to share their fortunes, some do not—at least to the extent more generous peers wish they would. 

Abigail Disney, one of the heiresses to the Walt Disney fortune who said in 2019 she’s worth about $120 million, recently shared her feelings about how much of their wealth billionaires should be willing to share.

“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999 million is kind of a sociopath,” Disney told The Guardian in an interview published on Monday. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of.”

Disney has begrudgingly disclosed her net worth in the past only to make a point about how important it is to her to give away the vast fortune bestowed upon her by being a part of one of the major family dynasties in the U.S. The Financial Times even called her a “class warrior” for how vocal she’s been about how much the wealthiest should be taxed. 

“The need to tax rich people like me has never been so dire,” Disney wrote in a 2024 op-ed entitled “World leaders have a chance to raise taxes for rich people like me. I’m begging them to take it” published by The Guardian. “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.”

Disney was also behind a 2019 letter signed by financier George Soros and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes calling for a “moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one-tenth of the richest 1% of Americans—on us.”

The Disney heiress and filmmaker in 1991 also founded the Daphne Foundation, a New York City-based nonprofit that invests funds for causes like fighting poverty, violence, and discrimination. The organization had donated about $70 million as of 2019.

Although Disney has said she’d given away about a third of her net worth, it came “back to me as quickly as I’ve given it away,” referencing how investments can grow wealth.

“By just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire,” Disney told The Guardian. “It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”

Billionaires who have given away their wealth

Other ultra-wealthy people have been giving vast amounts of their fortunes away. One prime example is MacKenzie Scott, who’s donated more than $19 billion of her $34.3 billion fortune. The five-year donation spree by the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been “transformational” for nonprofits, according to a study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. 

“It could take decades to truly understand the effects these gifts have had on nonprofits and the sector at large,” according to the report. “However, after five years of giving, the reported effects of her gifts on recipient organizations…remain overwhelmingly positive.”

Bill and Melinda French Gates have also been major philanthropists, having donated more than $77 billion since founding the Gates Foundation in 2000. 

“I believe that people who are financially successful have a responsibility to give back to society,” Bill Gates wrote on his blog Gates Notes. “In the 1990s, as Microsoft became successful, I decided I would eventually give away virtually all of my wealth. The goal of my philanthropy is to reduce inequity.”

Although French Gates resigned from the Gates Foundation in 2024, she put out an open call for nonprofits related to the betterment of women and girls to apply for grants through her organization, Pivotal, pledging to donate $1 billion during the next two years. French Gates’ net worth is about $14 billion, according to Bloomberg.

By “using my own personal resources to put substantial investments behind women or minorities,” she told NPR in October 2024. “I am pointing in a direction, I hope, for other philanthropists or even other governments.”

And Warren Buffett, the sixth-richest man in the world with a $155 billion net worth, also pledged in 2010 to give away more than 99% of his wealth to philanthropy during his lifetime or at his death.

“Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day,” Buffett wrote. “In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market plunged to new lows over the weekend as the fallout from President Trump’s Bitcoin has fallen 12% since Trump announced a deluge of tariffs on Wednesday, targeting imports from a list of countries including important U.S. trade partners like Vietnam, Japan and China. The world’s leading cryptocurrency has tumbled to a low of $74,700 in the last 24 hours, wiping out previous post-election gains. 

The broader crypto market has also been hammered by the tariff sell-off, as investors opt for less-risky investments or flee financial markets altogether. While Bitcoin is down 4% on Monday, other cryptocurrencies have fallen further with Ethereum falling 10%, XRP falling 9% and Solana falling 7%. Altogether, the crypto market has now wiped out 9% of its total market cap since Trump’s tariff announcement, falling from $2.72 trillion to $2.47 trillion. 

Traditional assets aren’t faring well either. The stock market is weathering a major downturn, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones both down 10% over the last 5 days.

Trump’s tariffs are expected to disrupt global supply chains, increase inflation and potentially trigger a recession by making the price of foreign goods higher. And while Bitcoin is touted by some industry leaders as an inflation hedge, it is often seen by financial advisors and retail investors as a risky asset similar to stocks and commodities. That’s led investors to brace themselves for the economic consequences by offloading their crypto holdings to limit the amount of risk in their portfolios. 

“The decline in crypto markets reflects a broader risk-off sentiment,” Thomas Perfumo, global economist at crypto exchange Kraken, told Fortune. “This isn’t an exodus from crypto, but a macro-driven recalibration.”

The latest crypto downturn is also a far cry from the optimism that followed Trump’s election in 2024, after an election which he promised to bolster the asset class. That culminated in Bitcoin reaching an all-time high of $109,000 in January. While Trump has delivered on a number of his crypto-related campaign promises, digital asset prices have been tumbling since his inauguration, weighed down by concerns of a slowing economy and the ramifications of a potential trade war. 

“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, and as we’re seeing, crypto is not immune to these global pressures,” Dr. Edward Felten, founder of Offchain Labs, the company that developed the Ethereum Layer 2 Arbitrum, told Fortune. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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