Shareholder value was more at risk prior to the bitcoin strategy. Most other business analytics companies went away or were absorbed into the tech titans. MicroStrategy was hanging on, but it was a melting ice cube, which then makes it hard to attract the best employees or maintain the best economy of scale, which then accelerates the melting of the ice cube.

And within the bitcoin strategy, taking on debt is the bigger risk. If bitcoin is in a bear market when their debt matures and without a lot of gains from the cost basis, that could cause them to dilute equity at a bad time, or have to sell bitcoin, or do other inopportune actions that would damage shareholder value.

Issuing overvalued equity to buy more bitcoin and thus improve the bitcoin-per-share metric, mildly de-risks the company by improving the equity/debt ratio, and is good for shareholder returns, assuming shareholders are bullish on bitcoin (which by this point, most of them are). It makes the overall company size way bigger, gives them a warchest of capital if they need it, helps them hire top talent including for their business analytics business, and reverse the melting ice cube trap.