Portnoy Picks "Down With The Ship" Over Another BTC Paper-Hand Massacre 🚢

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy said he is down millions on Bitcoin after buying near $100,000, and this time he is refusing to sell even if BTC goes to zero. In an interview with FOX Business host Stuart Varney on Varney & Co., Portnoy described a years-long pattern of mistiming the top crypto asset by market cap. "Yeah, I got regrets," Portnoy said. "I bought the thing at $100,000, so I mean, right now, I don't know what's going on." On June 4, Portnoy wrote on X that "Bitcoin and crypto are making me sad."

Portnoy said he is holding his current position rather than repeating what he called earlier mistakes. "I'm holding. I'll just hold this thing down to $0," he told Varney. "I know if I sell it, it's going to go nuclear again. I'd rather go down with the ship this time." BTC peaked above $126,080 in October before falling more than 50%, with a recent price of $62,162 cited in one report and $62,728.82 cited in CoinDesk data, reflecting a roughly $63,000 level in early July.

Portnoy framed his trading history as a series of buy-high, sell-low episodes, including panic-selling during a 2021 price drop, a phrase he described with the WallStreetBets-coined term "paperhanded." "There's nothing I've been wrong about more than Bitcoin," he said. "Every time I sell it, it goes nuclear. Every time I buy it, it tanks." Portnoy's exact BTC holdings are not publicly known.

His crypto activity has extended beyond Bitcoin, including past promotion of SafeMoon (SFM), identification as a member of the LINK Marines community supporting Chainlink's LINK token, and frequent trading of Solana-based meme coins. After his wallet was doxxed and he faced criticism over alleged meme-coin pumping and dumping, Portnoy publicly embraced JAILSTOOL, a meme coin using imagery of his face behind bars. He wrote on X, "Hey crypto bros, I think whoever made this coin is funny and I want to collect it as a memory of you bitches crying like little babies." JAILSTOOL reached a market cap above $210 million and secured a listing on centralized exchange Kraken before falling more than 99.5% to just above a $1 million market cap as of Friday.

Separately, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs returned to net inflows on Thursday, ending a 10-day losing streak as a weak jobs report and softer Federal Reserve signals eased pressure on risk assets, and at Consensus 2025 Portnoy said from the stage that the memecoin scene is ultimately unsustainable.