- Michael Burry said bitcoin is “not worth anything” and that seeing it hit $100,000 was “ridiculous.”
- The “Big Short” investor recently broke a two-year silence to share his thoughts on the market.
- Burry has disclosed bets against Nvidia and Palantir and warned that there’s an AI bubble.
“The Big Short” investor Michael Burry has said the hype around bitcoin is getting out of hand.
Burry called the blockchain-based currency the “tulip bulb of our time” on a podcast hosted by “The Big Short” author Michael Lewis, which aired on Tuesday, referencing the hype-driven tulip bubble crash in the 1600s.
“I think that bitcoin at $100,000 is the most ridiculous thing,” said Burry, who described the cryptocurrency as “not worth anything.”
“It’s worse than a tulip bulb, because this has enabled so much criminal activity to go deep under,” Burry told Lewis, who wrote about the investor’s famous bet against the housing market in the run-up to the financial crash in his 2010 book.
Bitcoin was up around 1.5% early Tuesday at about $88,700. The digital currency hit a record high of over $120,000 in October but has fallen more than 30% since then.
Burry’s attack on bitcoin is the latest salvo in the famed short-seller’s action-packed return to the public sphere.
After years of silence, Burry disclosed big bets against market darlings Nvidia and Palantir last month. The former hedge fund boss also called Tesla “ridiculously overvalued” and has issued regular warnings about the AI bubble on X and his newly-launched Substack.
It’s not the first time Burry, who was played by Christian Bale in a 2015 movie adaptation of Lewis’ book, has been critical of crypto.
In 2021, Burry warned that although he believed the reasons for bitcoin’s existence were “relevant,” the cryptocurrency was a “speculative bubble” that posed more risk than opportunity.
“If you do not know how much leverage is involved in the run-up, you may not know enough to own it,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet.