I just can't understand why investors would invest in (or lend money to) a company that would invest in crypto currencies. If they wanted crypto, why not simply buy it for themselves and save the skim?

Great question. The short answer is blind greed. The long answer is these companies issue debt in order to buy crypto. So by buying shares in these companies, you are leveraging your crypto investment. Strategy (MSTR) started acquiring Bitcoin while back. As Bitcoin's price started its runup, this caused a spike in the stock price as speculators jumped in on the action. Last year MSTR's stock increased by 573%, which was by far greater than any company in the S&P 500, walloping paltry gainers like NVDA and PLTR (MSTR is not in the S&P 500). Lots of companies are eager to get in on that action and have started using leverage to by crypto themselves. In theory, companies can continue to issue debt forever to buy more and more crypto as long the price of crypto keeps increasing. I think we can all see the problem with that.

There is one more catch too. MSTR is nominally a software company, but they don't make any money on that end of the business. It is all Bitcoin speculation. Perplexity tells me MSTR owns $73.9 billion of Bitcoin and has a market cap of about $89 billion. Which is to say one dollar of MSTR buys you less than one dollar of Bitcoin.

I don't know how this ends, but it doesn't end well.