Almost seven years ago this week, billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he would rather have bananas than Bitcoin. In a question-and-answer session with Wired on 27 Sept. 2019, Cuban compared
Almost seven years ago this week, billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he would rather have bananas than Bitcoin.
In a question-and-answer session with Wired on 27 Sept. 2019, Cuban compared Bitcoin to baseball cards, comic books and artwork. “I'd rather have bananas. I can eat bananas. Crypto, not so much," he said.
"Bitcoin is worth what somebody will pay for it. There's no real intrinsic value. You can't eat a baseball card," he further added.
"Your artwork might look good on the wall, but not much you can do with it. Bitcoin, there's even less you can do with it," he said during the interaction.
As per the historic data, Bitcoin closed at $8,251.85 on Sept. 27, 2019. A $1,000 investment that day would have bought about 0.1212 BTC.
With Bitcoin now trading at around $83,000, that holding would be worth about $10,058, a gain of roughly 906%.
The journey was far from steady.
Bitcoin was already sliding when Cuban made the remark, falling from $10,070 on Sept. 22, 2019, to $8,119 four days later.
It later climbed to an all-time high of $126,080 in October 2025, before dropping sharply in 2026. Anyone who held through the whole period would have watched the value of that $1,000 swing widely.
Cuban's view of Bitcoin has changed several times since 2019. He later invested in the cryptocurrency and called it a better version of gold, before saying in May 2026 that he had sold most of his holdings.
Cuban's decision followed a period when gold climbed during geopolitical turmoil while Bitcoin fell.
In August, he suggested that high-end AI chips could become "the new crypto" as an asset class.
Not everyone shares his doubts. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said in August that Bitcoin could overtake gold during the next bull market.
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