ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood took a swipe at venture capitalist Jason Calacanis after he described Bitcoin as a fading technology.
Calacanis claimed that Bitcoin’s most recent price move was ultimately a “dead cat bounce,” referring to the most recent BTC rally.
“Bitcoin is not a dead cat, Jason! It has many lives ahead,” Wood wrote on X.
Earlier this week, Bitcoin staged a sharp recovery above the $80,000 level after briefly falling below $76,000 earlier in the week.
From “punk rock to Muzak”
According to Calacanis, Bitcoin has now lost its spark after several stages of institutional adoption.
The podcaster and early Uber investor claimed that Bitcoin remains poorly suited for everyday transactions and smart contracts while still having an intimidating user experience for ordinary people.
According to Calacanis, institutional adoption has transformed BTC “from punk rock to Muzak.” The flagship cryptocurrency has settled for a rather mundane role of a store of value.
He went as far as comparing Bitcoin with CDs in the Spotify era and DVDs in the Netflix era.
“Digital capital”
Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor was among the high-profile Bitcoin proponents who joined Wood in pushing back against the most recent attack on Bitcoin by the prominent venture capitalist.
Saylor pointed to Bitcoin’s roughly $1.6 trillion valuation and argued that its role as “digital capital” was itself the killer application.
“Preserving wealth across generations is a bigger ambition than entertaining a dinner party,” Saylor wrote.
Calacanis’s complicated Bitcoin history
The criticism came despite Calacanis himself still having substantial exposure to Bitcoin.
In another post, Calacanis wrote that he owns a couple of million BTC, which is nothing to pay attention to.”
Calacanis was covering BTC as early as 2011, when it was still an obscure experiment. In May of that year, he argued that Bitcoin was technologically sound while potentially disruptive.
In August 2026, he said he had personally bought Bitcoin for less than $100. However, he had to part ways with these coins after a hacking incident. His wife, however, also accumulated Bitcoin at prices below roughly $100-$200.
Fast-forward to 2026, Calacanis remains financially exposed to an asset he now views as technologically stale after years of making dismissive comments about it.
