Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, defended Bitcoin this week while casting doubt on investing in gold.
In a Club Random podcast episode to be released Monday, host Bill Maher said he’s “very anti-Bitcoin” and believed in the value of gold.
Cuban replied, “I want Bitcoin to go down a lot further so I can buy some more.” He added, “If you have gold, you’re dumb as f***.”
Bitcoin has plunged more than 60% in value this year.
Maher replied that gold “never goes away” and is “like a hedge against everything else,” to which Cuban replied:
“No, but it’s not a hedge against anything, right? What it is is the stored value and you don’t own the physical gold, do you…Gold is a stored value and so is Bitcoin.”
The Shark Tank host continued, “It’s a digital transaction and it’s a stored value…So, people perceive that there is value associated with gold, that there’s value associated with Bitcoin.”
He noted that investing in gold does not generally mean that you possess the actual gold. “You don’t own the gold bar, and if everything went to hell in a hand basket and you had a gold bar, you know what would happen? Someone would beat the f*** out of you or kill you and take your gold bar.”
Cuban has slammed gold investing before. In 2019, for instance, he said in a Kitco News interview, “I hate gold. Gold is a religion.”
Cuban also recently weighed in on cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s collapse, which has sent shockwaves through the industry and spurred calls for crypto regulations. Referring to FTX’s former CEO and founder Sam Bankman-Fried, he said in an interview with TMZ:
“I don’t know all the details, but if I were him, I’d be afraid of going to jail for a long time. It sure sounds bad. I’ve actually talked to the guy and I thought he was smart, but boy, I had no idea he was going to, you know, take other people’s money and put it to his personal use. Yeah, that sure…seems like what happened.”
Despite the FTX collapse, Cuban said he still believes in crypto’s potential.
“Separate the signal from the noise,” he suggested. “There’s been a lot of people making a lot of mistakes, but it doesn’t change the underlying value.”
He added on the Club Random podcast that he is “not telling people to buy Bitcoin,” even though he still considers it a good investment.
Mark Mobius, the billionaire co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners, recently predicted Bitcoin will fall to $10,000 next year, down from $16,800 today. He was correct about this year’s fall to $20,000.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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