(Bloomberg) Michael Burry, who became a household name after his winning bet against mortgages was featured in “The Big Short,” issued a series of tweets on Thursday warning individual investors about losses “the size of countries” in the event of crypto and meme-stock declines.
“All hype/speculation is doing is drawing in retail before the mother of all crashes,” Burry wrote on Twitter before the posts were deleted. “When crypto falls from trillions, or meme stocks fall from tens of billions, #MainStreet losses will approach the size of countries. History ain’t changed.”
Burry, head of Scion Asset Management, is closely followed by the meme-stock crowd. He took a bullish stance on video-game retailer GameStop Corp. in 2019, which helped lay the foundations for an epic retail-investor frenzy earlier this year. His views have switched this year though, to warnings about dangers in the market.
“If I put $GME on your radar, and you did well, I’m genuinely happy for you,” he wrote in a tweet in January. “However, what is going on now — there should be legal and regulatory repercussions. This is unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”
Burry has a haphazard relationship with Twitter. He doesn’t post frequently from his account, but when he does his comments can be controversial. Last spring, he wrote on the social-media platform that lockdowns intended to contain the spread of Covid-19 were worse than the disease itself.
He has a habit of deleting his tweets soon after posting them. And earlier this year the investor told his followers that some of his Twitter activity had triggered a visit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Burry isn’t alone in his recent warnings about the cryptocurrency space. Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and an early crypto adopter, revealed to his Twitter followers this week that he’d been hit by the drop from roughly $60 to $0 of the DeFi Titanium token, part of a stablecoin project called Iron Finance.
“There should be regulation to define what a stable coin is and what collateralization is acceptable,” Cuban wrote to Bloomberg News in an email.
As for Burry, he has also placed a bet against Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. Scion Asset Management owned bearish puts against 800,100 shares of the electric-car maker as of March 31, according to a regulatory filing.
Burry, who was played by Christian Bale in the film version of Michael Lewis’s best-selling account of the 2008 financial crisis, “The Big Short,” was originally a doctor. After gaining his M.D. at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, he was an early adopter of discussing stock trades on online message boards and switched to professional investing.
