Some things that Saylor has done recently come off as a bit much, especially since he is contradicting his earlier approach without acknowledging it, and even making mistakes without apologizing and/or recognizing the mistakes (or at least the differing viewpoints on some of his tactics). He might have had put himself in a worse position based on how public that he has become, so it might be more difficult to not contradict ourselves from time to time.
Yes, you are right that the person who once said that he would not sell his Bitcoin portfolio very easily and that he would continue to buy no matter what the price was and that selling for the second time would really shake the trust of other people who follow Michael Saylor.
It is a bit like the story of the shepherd and the lion where the shepherd deceived the villagers by telling them that he was in danger for the first two days and when he was really in danger on the third day, people no longer believed him.
When Saylor initially said not to sell and to accept more Bitcoin, it was much more acceptable because he had kept his word for so many years but the question is how much people can trust him after this sale.
However, I am not sure if the strategy has actually changed their plans, it could be that they want to monitor the impact of their Bitcoin sale for which they did it and are preparing to make a big purchase later.
Saylor/MSTR painted themselves into a corner.
So, yeah, it is too bad that he had been so emphatic about the earlier statements about "never selling."
Once he had made those statements, he needed to figure out a way to address the statements rather than either acting like he had not made them or by proclaiming that he had really said something else, and the public had not understood him properly.
There likely needed to be some acknowledgement and/or maybe an apology.. yet it can be difficult to take such a large shift without some blowback.
So far the sales have not really been very BIG, so the sales really don't matter very much in material terms, even though they do matter in the absolutist terms that MSTR/Saylor had painted themselves into.
MSTR/Saylor is likely correct in terms of changing their "never sell your bitcoin" position, even though it seems awkward to be selling at price points that they either should be buying or that they should just be holding through the correction. Yet at the same time, they had put themselves into a position where they do not have a sufficient amount of cash, so that is another way in which they had created their own situation in the various ways that they had been exhausting whatever had been their cash reserves, including but not limited to resolving debt that did not need to be resolved, and buying too many bitcoin.
Sure, there is no problem to buy some bitcoin on the dip, but they likely should have had been buying in moderation in order to preserve their cash reserves and/or to even build their cash reserves since they had been continuing to generate money (or maybe some of the money that they were generating was just smoke and mirror and they were merely converting various assets so that they could keep up the allusion that they (MSTR) are always buying?).