Bitcoin Bubble Worse Than Tulip Mania, Claims ‘Big Short’ Michael Burry
Michael Burry has escalated his long-running battle on Bitcoin, calling it “the tulip bulb of our time” and insisting it’s “not price something.” Speaking on Michael Lewis’ “Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion” podcast launched on December 2, Burry recoiled at how normalized such valuations have change into in monetary media.
Burry Revives Tulip Bubble Comparison For Bitcoin
“I believe that Bitcoin at $100,000 is essentially the most ridiculous factor,” he mentioned. “Sane individuals are sitting on TV speaking about Bitcoin, they’re simply casually, ‘it’s 100,000, it’s down now, it’s 98,000.’ It’s not price something. Everybody’s accepted it. It’s the tulip bulb of our time.” He then pushed the analogy additional: “It’s worse than a tulip bulb as a result of this has enabled a lot prison exercise to go deep below.”
The trade was triggered when Lewis requested whether or not Burry’s “institutional pessimism” nudged him towards refuges like “Bitcoin or gold or one among these refuges that individuals” speak about. Burry rejected Bitcoin outright and drew a pointy distinction along with his personal positioning: “I’ve had gold since 2005.” In his framework, Bitcoin just isn’t “digital gold” however a speculative token whose perceived worth rests on social consensus and leverage, whereas concurrently, in his view, offering a robust channel for illicit flows quite than productive capital formation.
Burry’s critique is constant along with his broader view that markets are once more trapped in a cross-asset bubble pushed by narrative and low cost cash quite than fundamentals. But he doesn’t current himself as a crypto macro-trader trying to time Bitcoin’s subsequent leg decrease. Instead, Bitcoin seems within the interview as a type of exhibit A in a system that, he argues, has as soon as extra stopped asking what something is intrinsically price and easily extrapolates worth motion and tales.
Burry’s Critique Is Not New
The podcast marks the most recent chapter in a Bitcoin skepticism that Burry has been voicing because the final cycle. In late February 2021, with BTC close to its then-record zone, he tweeted that “BTC is a speculative bubble that poses extra threat than alternative regardless of many of the proponents being right of their arguments for why it’s related at this level in historical past,” including a warning on hidden leverage: “If you have no idea how a lot leverage is concerned within the run-up, you could not know sufficient to personal it.”
By June 2021, as meme shares and crypto surged collectively, Burry widened the lens. He described the surroundings because the “biggest speculative bubble of all time in all issues. By two orders of magnitude,” and cautioned that “all hype/hypothesis is doing is drawing in retail earlier than the mom of all crashes,” explicitly together with cryptocurrencies in that warning.
Today’s “tulip bulb” broadside on Lewis’ podcast doesn’t symbolize a brand new stance a lot because the end result of that trajectory: from calling Bitcoin a leveraged “speculative bubble” in early 2021 to declaring in 2025 that, on the sorts of ranges now mentioned on tv, it’s merely “not price something” in any respect.
At press time, BTC traded at $93,226.
