Michael Burry, the “Big Short” investor who made his name calling bubbles before breakfast, just rolled out a new paid Substack called Cassandra Unchained. The launch comes right after he de-registered Scion Asset Management from the SEC, which has everyone wondering what he’s planning next.
On X earlier this month, Burry teased that he’d be “on to much better things” starting November 25. His Substack, unveiled last night, opens with a set of letters revisiting his greatest hits, from shorting Amazon in 2000 to ignoring Alan Greenspan’s dismissal of a housing bubble in 2005.
The post grabbing the most attention is his takedown of the current AI boom. According to Business Insider, Burry argues that the industry is repeating the same script as the dot-com era, when the “Four Horsemen”, Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.4% ) , Intel $INTC ( ▲ 3.74% ) , Dell $DELL ( ▲ 3.85% ) , and Cisco $CSCO ( ▲ 0.18% ) , led a surge of investment that far outpaced real demand. In his view, today’s version looks eerily similar, with Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.4% ) , Google $GOOG ( ▲ 6.28% ) L, Meta $META ( ▲ 3.16% ) , Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 2.53% ) , Oracle $ORCL ( ▲ 0.77% ) , and even startups like OpenAI pouring money into data centers and compute infrastructure at a breakneck pace.
Burry compares Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 2.05% ) to the old Cisco, the company at the heart of the dot-com frenzy that eventually crashed 78 percent. And he’s not stopping there. In a recent X post, he accused major tech companies of understating depreciation on their computing hardware, a move he says “artificially boosts earnings.”
If his new Substack is any indication, Burry has plenty more fire to aim at the AI party. Whether he’s right again is the part markets will be watching very closely.