MicroStrategy founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor has settled with the District of Columbia for $40 million, the New York Times reported. This is the largest income tax fraud recovery in the district’s history.
As the market opened Monday, the shares of business analytics software company, which is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, were up 5%.
The District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against Saylor and his company in August 2022, claiming that the executive had not paid any income taxes in the district during the more than 10 years he had lived there. The lawsuit also alleged that MicroStrategy had conspired to help him avoid tax payments.
The attorney general’s office accused Saylor of evading over $25 million in taxes to the district by falsely claiming to live elsewhere from 2005 through 2020, per the report.
According to the Times, Brian L. Schwalb, the attorney general, said Saylor openly boasted about his tax evasion scheme, encouraging his friends to follow him and insisting that anyone who paid taxes to the district was dumb.
MicroStrategy and Saylor denied any wrongdoing, per the report. Saylor said in a statement that he has agreed to settle the matter to avoid “the continued burdens of the litigation on friends, family, and himself.”
Saylor, a former dot-com entrepreneur, founded MicroStrategy in 1989, and for the past few years, the company has emerged as the biggest advocate of Bitcoin. The leading cryptocurrency is now the core of its business model, and it holds $13.6 billion worth of Bitcoin, which represents 1% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply.
