Billionaire Michael Saylor Warns Against Buying a House Because ‘Every 36 Years You Actually Pay the Cost of the House in Tax to the Government’

Michael Saylor has spent six years telling anyone who will listen to buy Bitcoin (BTC). In an interview published on Aug. 6, he added a new instruction to the list: Do not buy a house.

“Let me tell you why you shouldn't buy a house,” the Strategy (MSTR) co-founder said on The Diary Of A CEO. “Because there's a 2% property tax on houses in Florida, which means that if you buy a house, you pay 2% of the value every year.” His conclusion followed immediately: “2% means that every 36 years you actually pay the cost of the house in tax to the government.” A house, he argued, is “not a very good store of value because you're taking on a massive tax load and you're taking on a maintenance load.”

What makes the remark land is what Saylor used to say about houses. In March 2021, with Bitcoin trading near $57,000, he told investors to put everything into the asset, then borrow more, then sell whatever they could bear to part with, and if they loved something too much to sell it, “go mortgage your house and buy bitcoin with it.” Five years later, the house is the thing he is warning people off.

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Saylor did leave himself carve-outs in his recent interview. “The only way that it's a good strategy is you're buying the house in a jurisdiction where the property taxes are manageable,” he said. Flip that and “you end up taking a 7% mortgage, and you get massive tax and massive insurance expenses, then that same investment works out the other way, and it crushes you to death.” He also allowed that owning a home still beats holding cash, and that commercial property can work because rents cover the carry.

Two of his numbers do not survive a check, however. Florida's effective property tax rate is not 2%; statewide it runs closer to 0.7% to 0.9% of market value, while Miami-Dade — where Saylor's own waterfront house sits — lands under about 1% on an effective basis. Saylor's figure is roughly double the real one, which means the tax burden he is describing is roughly twice as heavy as the one Florida homeowners actually carry.

The 36-year figure has a different problem in that it needs an assumption Saylor never states. At a flat 2% levied on a flat value, cumulative property tax equals the purchase price in 50 years, not 36. Reaching 36 requires the assessed value to climb about 2.2% a year, so that each year's bill is larger than the last. Oddly, the correction cuts in his favor; at the 7% annual appreciation Saylor cites elsewhere in the interview, the crossover arrives in roughly 22 years. At the same time, however, the house would have appreciated 350% in value during that same period. So his thesis is directionally fine, but the arithmetic doesn't necessarily hold up to scrutiny. Further, comparing higher-tax states like Florida to the whole of the country can be misleading. In some areas of the U.S., the effective tax rate is about 0.1%, meaning a $300,000 house could only be $300 or so per year. That's hardly a reason to write off home ownership in its entirety. 

The prescription is the one you would expect. Saylor ran through the alternatives on camera and ranked them by six-year return. “It's not an awful idea to buy gold," he said. "Gold is up 12% a year for the past six years. So whereas the [S&P 500 ($SPX)] is up 15%, gold is up 12%, the Nasdaq is up 18%, Bitcoin is up 33%.” Anyone can test those four claims against gold futures and the index data directly.

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Blanket housing and general starter wealth-building advice from very rich people has a mixed record on this beat. Charlie Munger has argued that the first $100,000 is the hard part and everything after it compounds. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban has suggested that with $100,000, the best guaranteed return is bulk toothpaste and soup, with the rest parked in the bank earning nothing. Saylor's answer is Bitcoin, and he is not a neutral party; Strategy holds 840,000 Bitcoin, a position he says amounts to about 4% of the supply.

Saylor is also candid about what that has cost. “The company today is $60 billion, but we peaked [at] about $125 billion,” he said early in the interview. That's an admission, in his own words, of a roughly 50% drawdown from the top. Warren Buffett has warned that prices and underlying business value diverge during bubbles and cannot stay divorced indefinitely, a caution that applies to leveraged Bitcoin balance sheets as readily as to anything else.

For the homeowner listening, the practical takeaway is narrower than the headline. Property taxes and maintenance are a genuine, permanent drag that buyers routinely underweight, and Saylor is right to say so. He is simply wrong about how large that drag is in the state he chose as his example.