STRIVE CLOSED ITS $630 MILLION SATS SALE — AND PUT $157.5 MILLION OF CASH AND SECURITIES IT ALREADY HAD INTO AN 18-MONTH DIVIDEND RESERVE — THE 15% CHECKS START NOVEMBER 9, EVERY BUSINESS DAY

Strive closed the sale of 7,000,000 shares of SATS, its new 15% preferred, on October 20 at $90 each. That’s $630 million before fees. Each share carries a $100 stated amount, so Strive now owes dividends on $700 million, about $105 million a year. They start November 9 and come every business day.

The 8-K that closed the deal says Strive put $22.50 a share, 18 months of dividends, into a reserve account. That’s $157.5 million, a quarter of the $630 million raised. It was funded “with a combination of existing cash on hand and securities.” On October 16, before the sale closed, Strive reported $317.5 million of cash and 505,000 shares of Strategy’s STRC.

Matt Cole has said why the reserve exists. On the One Chair Podcast on September 2, he said Strive shouldn’t “always assume that capital markets would be open and that we would have to sell a bunch of Bitcoin at the worst time.” Chief Risk Officer Jeff Walton put it this way in the closing release: “We don’t have any debt, or maturities, and we’re focused on a single obligation, the dividend.”

SATS sits behind $1.40 billion of SATA and ahead of the common stock. That single obligation just got $105 million a year bigger. The reserve buys 18 months. Bitcoin has to do the rest. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,028.