The billionaire investor Mark Cuban has announced that he sold off almost all of the Bitcoin he owned, explaining that the world’s number-one cryptocurrency turned out to be “disappointing” because it failed to be the hedging instrument he had hoped it would be.

Speaking on the Portfolio Players podcast, Cuban said Bitcoin has lost its reason for being.

It is a striking about-face from the star of the American reality show Shark Tank, who had repeatedly argued in the past that Bitcoin was a “better version” of gold and “the better alternative” to traditional fiat currencies, which in his view were destined to lose value.

None of that, it turns out, has happened.

The investor’s prediction appears to have proved wrong, and he admitted as much himself: «Well, gold has just exploded, climbing all the way to $5,000, while Bitcoin has fallen», Cuban noted, irritated that what he had forecast did not materialize.

He also added that «every time the dollar fell, Bitcoin should have risen».

Instead, that expected pattern apparently failed to hold.

So, with his forecasts having come up empty, one of the best-known and most-followed American investors in the world revealed that he had dumped “most of” his holdings in the digital currency.

But is Mark Cuban right?

In reality, although it is true that Bitcoin has underperformed gold over the past year, it has still done better than the ultimate safe-haven asset since the start of the US-Iran war.

Since the conflict began on February 28, 2026, the spot gold contract has lost 14.30%, falling to its current level of around $4,520 an ounce (over the past year, gold is still up more than 37%).

Bitcoin prices, despite a 30% year-over-year decline, have jumped 17.8% over the same period, settling at the current $77,600.

Mark Cuban went further, voicing his deep dissatisfaction with memecoins as well, which he branded as “garbage.”

Here too it is a U-turn that market watchers did not miss, given that the investor was one of the most prominent backers of Dogecoin — so much so that the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, the team Cuban owned for more than 20 years, had started accepting DOGE as a means of payment for tickets and merchandise.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Laura Naka Antonelli on May 22, 2026 as «Mark Cuban dice basta al Bitcoin. E bolla “spazzatura” queste altre scommesse». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.