“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer startled Bitcoin investors Friday, panicking swaths of investors on Crypto Twitter after the former crypto skeptic issued a bullish call.

Fielding a question from a Florida-based investor during the show’s Lightning Round Thursday, Cramer said that the Bitcoin-buying firm MicroStrategy is a less attractive investment than Bitcoin itself, from his occasionally dubious perspective.

“I’ve got to tell you it’s a Bitcoin play—I prefer to actually own Bitcoin,” Cramer said of MicroStrategy, noting that the influential investment firm Citron Research disclosed a short position in the firm this week. “All I can tell you is, own Bitcoin. That’s a winner.”

Cramer, who said that he bought a farm and boat by selling his Bitcoin and Ethereum holdings in 2022, flipped bullish on Bitcoin earlier this year. In January, he acknowledged that “you can’t kill” Bitcoin, while describing its resilience in the face of regulators as a “technological marvel.”

Despite his months-long embrace of Bitcoin, Cramer’s praise Thursday was viewed on Crypto Twitter as a potential bear market omen. Tinged with a sense of tongue-in-cheek irony, it was as if Cramer’s Bitcoin praise was conducive to the sky falling.

“IT’S SO OVER,” crypto influencer Tiffany Fong wrote on Twitter (aka X).

“In other words, the bull market just signed its death certificate,” self-described analyst Jacob King wrote. “I’m maxing out 48 lines of credit and shorting [Bitcoin] with my life savings.”

As the crypto and finance community have grown skeptical of Cramer’s advice, some investors have honed in on an “inverse Cramer” trend. Doing the exact opposite of what the "Mad Money" host views as favorable moves, a now-defunct ETF once brought that strategy to Wall Street.

“It’s over,” an account called Inverse Cramer proclaimed on Twitter (aka X), a dismal declaration that had racked up more than 500,000 views on the platform in a matter of hours.

Even though Cramer has profited from selling crypto, he admitted a year ago that his selling may have been “premature.” At the time he recognized the gravity of his unrealized Bitcoin profits, the asset traded hands around $38,000, an 18-month peak at the time.

Following the collapse of FTX in 2022, it appeared that Cramer was leaving crypto behind for good, encouraging investors to do the same. “It’s never too late to sell an awful position, and that’s what you have if you own these so-called digital assets,” Cramer recommended.

While the “Mad Money” said that he’d prefer to own Bitcoin over MicroStrategy shares, he once encouraged companies to adopt Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset like MicroStrategy has. The firm’s trove of 331,200 Bitcoin is currently worth $32 billion, per Bitcoin Treasuries.

“Every treasurer should be going to their boards of directors and saying, ‘Should we put a small portion of our cash in Bitcoin?’” Cramer said in 2021. “I think it’s almost irresponsible not to include it.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward