Michael Burry Bets on Build-A-Bear as Retail Rediscovers Stuffed Animals
The Big Short guy just filed a 13F showing a position in BBW, which is 25% short interest and down 60% this year, so naturally the squeeze talk has begun.
Michael Burry—yes, that Michael Burry, the one Christian Bale played, the one who bought credit default swaps when CDOs were cool—has disclosed a position in Build-A-Bear Workshop. Ticker BBW. The stuffed animal company. The one in the mall next to the Auntie Anne's. Short interest is sitting at 25% of the float. The stock is down 60% year-to-date. You can see where this is going.
Burry's 13F showed up earlier this week and the usual corners of the internet lit up like it was January 2021 all over again. Build-A-Bear is not GameStop—revenue actually grew last quarter, margins are intact, and kids still want to stuff a bear and give it a birth certificate for $35. But none of that matters when a famous contrarian takes a swing at something this heavily shorted. The thesis writes itself: forgotten retailer, decent fundamentals, massive short position, one headline away from chaos.
Here's the setup. BBW trades around $22. It peaked near $60 in late 2021 when everyone thought experiential retail was the future and malls were having a moment. That moment ended. Shorts piled in. Now a quarter of the shares available are borrowed and sold by people betting it goes lower. Burry shows up, files paperwork, and suddenly every Discord channel with 'squeeze' in the name is running DCF models on plush toy velocity.
The problem—or the opportunity, depending on your risk tolerance—is that short squeezes are not a strategy, they're a side effect. You need a catalyst. Burry buying is a start, but he's also the guy who stayed short housing for two years while his investors tried to fire him. His timing is legendary in hindsight and brutal in real time. If BBW keeps falling, the shorts just make more money and the float stays tight. If it rips, covering starts, gamma shows up, and things get stupid fast.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, just watched $643 million leave ETFs after Binance got hit with what's being called the biggest crypto hack in history. $6.3 billion gone, withdrawn, vaporized—pick your verb. IBIT, BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, led the outflows. For context, that's the same fund that pulled in $37 billion in its first year. One hack, one headline, and suddenly everyone remembers that 'not your keys, not your coins' was never just a meme. BTC dropped 5% in two days.
There's a new leveraged Bitcoin ETF called STCE that launched this week, because apparently watching your portfolio swing 8% a day wasn't enough. It offers 1.25x daily exposure to Bitcoin, which is a weird middle ground between 'I want risk' and 'but not that much risk.' It's up 21% since inception, which sounds great until you remember Bitcoin itself is down and leverage works both ways. The prospectus warns about volatility, decay, and compounding. No one will read it.
So you've got Burry buying a bear store with a squeeze setup, Bitcoin bleeding half a billion in ETF outflows after a historic hack, and a new leveraged crypto product launching into the storm. It's late October 2026 and the vibes are immaculate. If you're holding BBW calls, BTC spot, or anything with a Greek in the name, congratulations: you're alive. If you're not, you're missing the best bad decisions of the quarter.