Michael Burry, famous “Big Short” investor who predicted the 2008 housing crash, Another warning of bubbles in emerging markets. Nearly two decades later, the hedge fund manager is now sounding the alarm about sky-high valuations for artificial intelligence companies, and he’s doing so in a modern forum: Substack.
Yesterday (November 23), Burry launched a newsletter on the platform that will focus on his pessimistic view of the technology, among other topics. “The current market environment is contentious and heated. There is a lot to talk about,” he wrote in the description of the new Substack, which already has more than 35,000 subscribers. Access costs $379 per year or $39 per month.
His first blog post drew parallels between the dot-com crash of the early 2000s and today’s AI boom. Burry compared Nvidia, which recently became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market cap, to Cisco, a technology company whose stock price soared and then plummeted during the dot-com era.
In an X post announcing his Substack, Burry expanded on the idea that the AI market may be echoing past bubbles. He cited former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who assured investors in 2005 that a housing bubble “seems unlikely.” Burry then noted that current Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell described AI companies as “lucrative” and “different” from previous speculative manias.
Michael Burry’s track record is mixed
Burry rose to prominence after spotting warning signs of the subprime mortgage crisis, a bet that made him $100 million personally and more than $700 million for his clients. His prescient act was immortalized in the work of Michael Lewis. big short and the subsequent film starring Christian Bale. After the global financial crisis, Warren Buffett told Congress that Bury acted as “Cassandra,” a reference to the cursed Trojan princess who would deliver true prophecies that no one believed. His new newsletter pays homage to this feat with the title “Cassandra Unchained.”
Burry has made repeated market appeals in recent years without success, but his latest warning about artificial intelligence has sparked new attention online. Rumors began in October when he returned to X after a two-year hiatus and posted: “Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, something needs to be done about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.”
Soon after, his hedge fund Scion Asset Management disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had made more than $1 billion worth of short bets on Nvidia and another popular AI stock, Palantir. Days later, Burry closed his hedge fund and returned money to investors.
Burry said in his Substack description that Scion closed in part because of a desire to share investment ideas more freely. “Professional money management comes with regulatory and compliance restrictions that effectively limit my ability to communicate,” he wrote. “These restrictions mean I can only share publicly the cryptic snippets, if any.”
Burry told readers there will be one or two posts per week, along with occasional Q&A, videos and guest contributions. Instead of betting, he will beat the market.
“I’m not retiring,” Burry said. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than analyzing companies and markets every day.”
