Cathie Wood Rejects 'Dead Cat' Label for Bitcoin, Touts Deflation Hedge Days After ARK ETF Sale

Cathie Wood pushed back forcefully on Friday against investor Jason Calacanis's characterization of Bitcoin as a "dead cat," arguing the cryptocurrency "has many lives ahead" — a bullish stance that came just days after her firm unloaded roughly $40 million of its own spot Bitcoin ETF shares.

The founder and chief executive of ARK Invest was responding to a post by Calacanis, host of the "This Week in Startups" podcast, who on Sept. 18 shared Bitcoin's one-year price chart showing a decline of about 30%. "The dead cat continues to bounce," he wrote, adding that 17 years after its launch, Bitcoin is still not used for transactions and remains "intimidating" for most people.

Calacanis, who described the asset as a "boring store of value" that is "no longer capturing the public's imagination," compared Bitcoin to "CDs in the age of Spotify." He also argued that if the cryptocurrency were going to achieve mass adoption with a real use case, it would have done so by now.

Wood, one of the earliest institutional investors in the asset class, was direct in her rebuttal. "Bitcoin is not a dead cat, Jason! It has many lives ahead," she wrote on X, while pointing followers to the Sept. 17 episode of ARK's "Bitcoin Brainstorm" podcast, which focused on the convergence between artificial intelligence and Bitcoin.