Since pivoting from investor to writer, he has revisited his GameSpot bet and touted Fannie and Freddie.
The mysterious Michael Burry has pulled back the curtain over the past six weeks, revealing his views on everything from bitcoin and meme stocks to the AI boom and the Federal Reserve.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame was previously known for posting cryptic warnings on X, only to swiftly delete them and go silent for months or years at a time.
He has now closed his hedge fund to outside cash, and shifted his focus to writing about his personal investments and sharing his financial analyses on Substack.
Business Insider trawled through Burry’s Substack, X posts, and a recent podcast interview with author Michael Lewis to gather the key insights and details he has shared so far.
Burry returned to X in late October after going quiet in April 2023. His commentary since then has centered on concerns of a historic bubble in AI.
He has warned that the tech companies leading the charge are seeing a slowdown in cloud-computing growth, overinvesting in equipment such as Nvidia chips and data centers, dragging out depreciation to inflate their short-term earnings, destroying shareholder value through excessive stock-based compensation, and signing “give-and-take” contracts with one another to keep the buzz going.
Burry — who shot to fame after his lucrative bet against the mid-2000s housing boom was chronicled by Lewis in “The Big Short” — has also compared AI mania to the dot-com and housing bubbles, predicting it too will end in disaster.
He has labeled OpenAI the “Netscape of our time,” saying it’s “hemorrhaging cash.” He has disclosed bets against market darlings Nvidia and Palantir, and predicted the AI bubble will burst within two years. He has also advised investors who’ve won big on high-flying assets to cash out their winnings.
“I think the stock market could be in for a number of bad years,” he told Lewis during what might be his final interview, per his Substack.
Burry also said that bitcoin trading at $100,000 was “the most ridiculous thing” as it’s “not worth anything,” and called it “worse than a tulip bulb” because it has enabled so much crime. The most popular cryptocurrency now trades below $90,000.
On the other hand, Burry revealed that he has owned gold since 2005, and described Google-parent Alphabet as the “value investor’s favorite” among mega-cap tech stocks.
Burry told Lewis that the Fed has “done a lot of damage” since its founding more than a century ago.
He said the US central bank doesn’t do “anything very helpful,” and the Treasury could just have a department to set interest rates and control the money supply instead.
Burry has also warned that the US banking system is showing signs of “fragility,” and banks are “getting weaker way too fast.”
Moreover, he has defended his past comments on the regional banking fiasco, pandemic-fueled inflation, and a potential meme-stock crash, saying his calls were largely on the money.
He has shared details of his personal portfolio, including that he has emulated most of his fund’s positions and owns shares of Lululemon, Molina Healthcare, Shift4 Payments, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.
In a Monday post, he revisited his sale of GameStop shortly before the meme stock skyrocketed in January 2021, saying he had “no idea what was coming.” He also teased a future post that will be a “breakdown of GameStop as an investment today.”
Burry’s other revelations so far include the fact that he has known Nvidia’s finance chief, Colette Kress, for years, and bought the chipmaker’s stock in 2017 or 2018.
As promised in his Substack’s name, “Cassandra Unchained,” Burry is speaking freely for the first time in many years — and may just be getting started.
