'Big Short' investor Michael Burry teases a bet against crypto - and warns market speculation has reached historic levels
- Michael Burry is considering placing a wager against cryptocurrencies.
- "The Big Short" investor asked on Twitter how he could bet against the digital coins.
Michael Burry, who made his name and fortune by betting against the housing bubble, has set his sights on a new target: cryptocurrencies.
"Ok, I haven't done this before, how do you short a cryptocurrency?" he said in a now-deleted tweet this week. "Do you have to secure a borrow? Is there a short rebate? Can the position be squeezed and called in?"
Burry, whose massive wager against subprime mortgages was immortalized in the book and the movie "The Big Short," emphasized that he was only considering taking a position against crypto.
"In such volatile situations, I tend to think it's best not to short, but I'm thinking out loud here," he tweeted.
The Scion Asset Management boss, who routinely deletes his tweets, recently locked his Twitter profile to new users. He cited the army of meme-stock and crypto zealots and bots commenting on his tweets to drum up interest.
"Crypto/Meme bots and pumpers reply to big accounts in huge numbers for the promotion," Burry tweeted. "Deleting tweets knocks it back. Going Private allows tools to discourage them."
"But it's breathtaking, this religion of real and fake people," he continued. "The speculation probably tops anything in history."
Burry has repeatedly criticized crypto this year. He's dismissed shiba inu coin as "pointless," ridiculed dogecoin's surging price, and warned bitcoin is a "speculative bubble" that's fueled by huge amounts of leverage and vulnerable to government crackdowns.
The fund manager also compared the excitement around bitcoin, meme stocks, and other popular assets to the mid-2000s housing boom and the dot-com bubble. He warned they've been "driven by speculative fervor to insane heights from which the fall will be dramatic and painful."
Besides his housing bet, Burry is known for investing in GameStop and inadvertently paving the way for the short squeeze on the stock in January, as well as the broader meme-stock frenzy this year. Notably, Burry's latest portfolio update showed he was betting against Elon Musk's Tesla and Cathie Wood's Ark Invest.