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Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, left, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the company’s virtual shareholder meeting on Tuesday morning. (Screenshot via webcast)
Microsoft shareholders turned down a proposal calling on the company to consider diversifying its investments by including Bitcoin in the mix, but the company was actually more open-minded than it might seem.
In fact, the reason the board recommended voting against the proposal was that “Microsoft’s management already carefully considers this topic.”
Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, elaborated in response to questions submitted by shareholders during a Q&A session at the virtual annual meeting Tuesday morning. She started by explaining that Microsoft has accepted Bitcoin as a form of payment from customers since 2014.
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“As we continue to think about the evolution of crypto, we’ve also thought about it as an asset class,” Hood said. Microsoft’s treasury team, along with its board, “looks at all the asset classes available to us,” she added.
Microsoft had $78.5 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments on hand as of Sept. 30, 2024, according to its latest quarterly financial report.
In her comments at the meeting, Hood emphasized the importance of liquidity — along with capital preservation and income — to fund operations, invest in partnerships, and build data centers, among other uses of its cash.
“So with those three goals, we look across asset classes, including cryptocurrency, as a form of investment,” Hood said. “It’s something we cover with the board consistently and continue to assess different categories year-to-year.”
All six outside proposals were rejected by Microsoft shareholders during the company’s virtual annual meeting Tuesday, according to preliminary results. Detailed results are expected to be made public within four days.
The Bitcoin shareholder proposal, submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research, noted that Microsoft had $484 billion in assets as of March 31, including investments in U.S. government securities and corporate bonds that “barely outpace inflation,” as the text of the proposal put it.
“[I]n inflationary times like these, corporations should — and perhaps have a fiduciary duty to — consider diversifying their balance sheets with assets that appreciate more than bonds, even if those assets are more volatile short-term,” it added.
Specifically, the proposal called for the board to “conduct an assessment to determine if diversifying the Company’s balance sheet by including Bitcoin is in the best long-term interests of shareholders.”
Speaking on behalf of the proposal was Michael Saylor, a billionaire Bitcoin investor, who released his presentation on X on Dec. 1, in advance of the meeting. Saylor’s firm, MicroStrategy, invests heavily in Bitcoin.
The price of Bitcoin hit a new high on Dec. 4 — $100,000 for a single Bitcoin — before dropping to $94,000 today in a broader sell-off of the cryptocurrency.
