Michael Burry Doubles Down: ’Bitcoin Bubble Makes Tulip Mania Look Tame’
Wall Street's favorite doomsayer strikes again—this time targeting crypto's golden child.
Michael Burry—the hedge fund manager who called the 2008 crash—just threw gasoline on the Bitcoin debate. His latest take? Today's crypto frenzy dwarfs even history's most infamous speculative bubble.
Tulips vs. Tokens: A Speculative Showdown
17th-century Dutch tulip bulbs once traded for mansions. Now? 'Digital scarcity' narratives push Bitcoin's market cap past small nations' GDPs. Burry's argument hinges on one brutal question: What's backing the asset—utility or collective delusion?
The Contrarian Playbook
Short sellers live for these moments. While crypto bulls tout institutional adoption, skeptics see echoes of every pre-crash euphoria cycle—complete with celebrity endorsements and 'this time it's different' mantras.
One hedge fund manager's panic is another trader's profit opportunity. As always on Wall Street, the real bubble might be in certainty itself.
Burry Revives Tulip Bubble Comparison For Bitcoin
“I think that Bitcoin at $100,000 is the most ridiculous thing,” he said. “Sane people are sitting on TV talking about Bitcoin, they’re just casually, ‘it’s 100,000, it’s down now, it’s 98,000.’ It’s not worth anything. Everybody’s accepted it. It’s the tulip bulb of our time.” He then pushed the analogy further: “It’s worse than a tulip bulb because this has enabled so much criminal activity to go deep under.”
The exchange was triggered when Lewis asked whether Burry’s “institutional pessimism” nudged him toward refuges like “Bitcoin or gold or one of these refuges that people” talk about. Burry rejected bitcoin outright and drew a sharp contrast with his own positioning: “I have had gold since 2005.” In his framework, Bitcoin is not “digital gold” but a speculative token whose perceived value rests on social consensus and leverage, while simultaneously, in his view, providing a powerful channel for illicit flows rather than productive capital formation.
Burry’s critique is consistent with his broader view that markets are again trapped in a cross-asset bubble driven by narrative and cheap money rather than fundamentals. But he does not present himself as a crypto macro-trader looking to time Bitcoin’s next leg lower. Instead, Bitcoin appears in the interview as a kind of exhibit A in a system that, he argues, has once more stopped asking what anything is intrinsically worth and simply extrapolates price action and stories.
Burry’s Critique Is Not New
The podcast marks the latest chapter in a Bitcoin skepticism that Burry has been voicing since the last cycle. In late February 2021, with BTC NEAR its then-record zone, he tweeted that “BTC is a speculative bubble that poses more risk than opportunity despite most of the proponents being correct in their arguments for why it is relevant at this point in history,” adding a warning on hidden leverage: “If you do not know how much leverage is involved in the run-up, you may not know enough to own it.”
By June 2021, as meme stocks and crypto surged together, Burry widened the lens. He described the environment as the “greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things. By two orders of magnitude,” and cautioned that “all hype/speculation is doing is drawing in retail before the mother of all crashes,” explicitly including cryptocurrencies in that warning.
Today’s “tulip bulb” broadside on Lewis’ podcast does not represent a new stance so much as the culmination of that trajectory: from calling Bitcoin a Leveraged “speculative bubble” in early 2021 to declaring in 2025 that, at the kinds of levels now discussed on television, it is simply “not worth anything” at all.
At press time, BTC traded at $93,226.
