‘Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry Admits He ‘Slept’ on Bitcoin in 2013 Despite Early Move to Buy

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.

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.