Billionaire investor Mark Cuban had once described Bitcoin as a superior version of gold. However, he recently disclosed selling about 80% of his BTC holdings after the token failed to perform amid ongoing geopolitical tensions, dollar weakness, and overall economic volatility.
He said in an episode of the ‘Portfolio Players’ podcast that Bitcoin has not been behaving like a safe-haven asset since the onset of the Middle East conflict, which is the core reason for him selling the cryptocurrency.
‘When all this shit hit the fan with the Iran war, Bitcoin was always the best alternative to fiat currency losing its value and I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold. Well, gold just blew up… bitcoin dropped. And every time the dollar dropped, bitcoin should’ve gone up … and it just didn’t do that,’ Cuban had said.
Drastic Shift in Cuban’s Crypto Sentiment
Cuban’s BTC selloff is a sharp U-turn from his comments during the 2021 interview on ‘The Delphi Podcast,’ where he said his crypto portfolio comprise ‘60% BTC, 30% Ethereum, and 10% the rest,’ and that Bitcoin scarcity made it a more robust store of value than gold. Back then, Cuban had also compared blockchain technology and smart contracts with the early internet era, praising Ethereum for facilitating decentralised financial applications.
He was even a fierce advocate of Dogecoin as the Dallas Mavericks started accepting DOGE tokens as payments for tickets and merchandise. In January 2025, Cuban even told CNBC that he’d rather own Bitcoin than gold if something bad happens to the economy, believing that BTC has more value.
He explained that if the USD collapses, gold could keep the holder from going broke, but physical gold is heavy, easy to steal, and difficult to exchange for goods and services.
‘People aren’t gonna walk around with gold bars. “Oh, look, he owns gold.’ Bam! ‘Now I own gold.”‘ he had stated. ‘What are you gonna do with it? Let me slice you off a little piece?’
He argued that Bitcoin is portable and easier to use compared with gold when it comes to smaller transactions. ‘It’s easier to buy and sell. You can fractionalize it, you can buy things, you can transfer it internationally. And so, I think it has more value than gold,’ he had said last year.
However, his entire sentiment around BTC appears to have changed and fatigue over the prospects of the token seems to have set it. On Bitcoin’s poor performance this year, Cuban said it was ‘not the hedge I expected it to be, and that was really disappointing, and so I’d say I’m more disappointed in bitcoin, not as disappointed in Ethereum and the rest … garbage.’
Cuban’s Long Time Friend Goes All in on Crypto
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He added that Bitcoin has ‘lost the plot’ and expressed his dissatisfaction with the crypto industry in general, adding that it hasn’t come up with an ‘application for grandma.’
Even Cuban’s friend, Kevin O’Leary, is a big advocate of Bitcoin, with massive investments in recent years. However, unlike Cuban, O’Leary has gone all in when it comes to the cryptocurrency industry. He holds massive stakes in BTC and other cryptos as well as building multiple data centres across vast stretches of land in the US and Canada to support AI infrastructure buildout and cryptocurrency mining.
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