IonQ (IONQ) shares are taking a beating Tuesday, and the culprit might be a familiar face: Martin Shkreli. The former pharmaceutical executive has been a vocal critic of the quantum computing company, and his latest broadside seems to have hit a nerve.

The drama started when Mike Alfred, a board member of Bitcoin mining firm IREN, tweeted that a major quantum company had claimed its technology made it "relatively trivial" to mine all remaining Bitcoin in 48 hours. Shkreli didn't hold back in his response, naming IonQ directly: "IONQ said this to a lot of people and they were lying." Ouch.

The accusation comes at a tough time for IonQ. The broader market is in a funk — the Nasdaq is down 2.18% and the S&P 500 has shed 1.01% — and crypto-adjacent stocks are feeling the heat. Bitcoin is sliding as traders grow pessimistic about the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, which had been gaining momentum but now faces an uncertain path ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

This isn't Shkreli's first run-in with IonQ. Back in late 2025, he tore into CEO Peter Chapman for comparing the company's trajectory to Nvidia and Cisco, calling it "the craziest statement from a CEO I have ever heard." Shkreli has consistently argued that IonQ is "one of the best shorts" of his career, pointing to what he sees as revenue gimmicks and insider stock sales. And he's not alone in his skepticism about the timeline for quantum computing: Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has estimated that practical, commercial quantum computing is still 15 to 20 years away.

So what does the short interest data say? In the latest reporting period, short interest in IonQ actually decreased, falling from 83.72 million shares to 73.28 million. That still leaves 20.63% of the company's publicly available shares sold short. Based on recent average trading volume of 36.25 million shares per day, it would take about 2.02 days for short sellers to cover their positions — not an extreme squeeze risk, but enough to keep things interesting.

As of Tuesday's publication, IonQ shares were down 9.75% at $56.68. Whether Shkreli's latest attack is just noise or a sign of deeper problems remains to be seen, but for now, the market seems to be listening.