Michael Burry, the Scion Asset Management founder who “diagnosed” the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse, recently laid out a decades-long road map of his hits and misses, revealing a rare admission of a “lost” trade: he almost bought Bitcoin in 2013.
Well, I have called just about everything significant that has happened the last 26 years.
It’s hard to say I’ve never had the timing right.
I was short Amazon at the top in 2000.
I went way long small cap value in late 2000.
I bought AAPL in 1998 and then again in 2002.
In…— Cassandra Unchained (@michaeljburry) February 22, 2026
According to Burry, a meeting with a friend at Lightspeed Venture Partners nearly led him to enter the crypto market when $BTC was trading under $200, but he ultimately “slept on it,” missing the chance to capture what would have been an appreciation worth thousands of percent over the next decade.
“Cassandra” warning: $BTC Patterns
Although Burry may regret his hesitation in 2013, his current stance on Bitcoin is far more adversarial. Under his “Cassandra Unchained” persona on X, Burry shared a new chart titled “$BTC Patterns” this month, comparing the current market structure to the collapse of 2021-2022.
The chart shows a peak of $126,000 in October 2025, followed by a drop to approximately $73,000. This draws an ominous parallel to the previous cycle’s 50% plunge. Burry warns that this could trigger a “death spiral” for overleveraged institutional holders, such as Strategy (ex. MicroStrategy), and mining firms if the price falls to around $50,000 per $BTC.
The investor’s pessimism extends beyond cryptocurrency to what he calls the “AI bubble.” Burry recently disclosed bearish put options on high-flyers like Nvidia (NVDA) and Palantir (PLTR), arguing that tech giants are inflating profits by stretching the reported useful lives of their hardware.
Just as he missed the long-term Bitcoin play in 2013, he now believes that the current institutional “stockpiling” of both AI chips and Bitcoin is a temporary speculative force and not a sign of permanent adoption.