Michael Saylor says bitcoin doesn't need Warren Buffett's support — and notes Microsoft has thrived without the investor's backing

• Bitcoin can thrive without crypto-critic Warren Buffett's support, according to Michael Saylor.
• Buffett never bet big on Microsoft, but the software maker still flourished, the MicroStrategy CEO said.
• Saylor, who often quotes Buffett, said the investor has overlooked the value of bitcoin's brand.

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, whose software company owns about $6 billion worth of bitcoin, said the cryptocurrency doesn't need Warren Buffett's endorsement to be wildly successful.

Buffett dismissed cryptocurrencies last year as basically worthless because they don't produce anything. Saylor highlighted the criticism from the famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO during a presentation at MicroStrategy's virtual investor day this week.

He pointed out that other assets have performed extremely well without Buffett's backing, and suggested bitcoin could flourish if even 5% of institutional investors embrace it.

"Warren Buffett never bought Microsoft stock, and he was best friends with Bill Gates for nearly a generation," Saylor said, according to a transcript on Sentieo, a financial-research site.

"So just because successful investors don't embrace bitcoin doesn't mean that it's not going to grow," he continued. "Microsoft has been quite successful even without a Berkshire Hathaway investment."

It's worth noting that Buffett personally bought 100 Microsoft shares after his first meeting with Gates 30 years ago, as he wanted to follow the software company and its cofounder. However, he's refrained from buying the stock on Berkshire's behalf, out of concern that people would suspect he was getting inside information from Gates.

Saylor has closely followed Buffett for more than a decade. For example, he defended MicroStrategy's lack of contact with investors and analysts in 2005 by deploying the investor's quote that "the stock market is a weighing machine in the long term," an earnings-call transcript on Sentieo shows.

The software executive has also tweeted a bunch of Buffett quotes over the past 18 months, jokingly suggesting the investor was referring to bitcoin with each one. Moreover, he told Cointelegraph earlier this year that Buffett had failed to understand that bitcoin, like Coca-Cola, has value because of its name recognition.