While you’ve been sweating the details over Thanksgiving, famed investor Michael Burry – the one portrayed by Christian Bale played in “The Big Short” – has been waging an increasingly aggressive war against Nvidia.
It’s a battle worth watching because Burry might actually win it. What makes this different from every other warning about an AI bubble is that Burry now has the audience and the freedom from regulatory constraints to potentially become the catalyst for the very collapse he’s predicting. He’s betting against the AI boom, but he’s also proactively trying to convince his growing number of followers that the emperor – Nvidia – has no clothes. What everyone is now wondering is whether Burry can create enough doubt to truly hobble Nvidia and, by association, the other main characters in this story, including OpenAI.
Burry has really thrown himself into the effort in recent weeks. He’s been slinging mud at Nvidia; he also traded nasty comments with Palantir CEO Alex Karp after regulatory filings revealed Burry held bearish put options on both companies – a bet worth over $1 billion that they’d crash. (Karp went on CNBC and called Burry’s strategy “batshit crazy,” to which Burry responded by mocking Karp for not understanding how to read an SEC filing.) The spat encapsulates the market’s central divide: is AI going to transform everything and thus worth every billion invested, or are we now in mania territory that’s destined to end badly?
Burry’s allegations are specific and damning. He says Nvidia’s stock-based compensation has cost shareholders $112.5 billion, essentially “reducing owner’s earnings by 50%.” He has suggested that AI companies are cooking their books by slow-walking depreciation on equipment that’s losing value fast. (Burry believes that Nvidia customers are overstating the useful lives of Nvidia’s GPUs in order to justify runaway capital expenditures.) As for all that customer demand, Burry has basically proposed it’s a mirage because AI customers are “funded by their dealers” in a circular financing scheme.
Enough people have begun citing Burry that Nvidia, despite its blowout earnings report last week, felt compelled to respond recently. In a seven-page memo sent to Wall Street analysts last weekend by Nvidia’s investor relations team – a development first reported by Barron’s – the company fired back, saying that Burry’s math is wrong, including because he “incorrectly included RSU taxes” (the real buyback figure is $91 billion, not $112.5 billion, the memo says). Nvidia’s employee compensation is also “consistent with peers.” And Nvidia is definitely, absolutely, not Enron, thank you very much.
Burry’s responsein a nutshell: I didn’t compare Nvidia to Enron. I’m comparing Nvidia to Cisco circa the late 1990s, when it overbuilt infrastructure that nobody actually needed at the time and its stock cratered 75% when everyone realized as much.
This could all look like a tempest in a teapot by Thanksgiving next year – or not! Nvidia’s stock has gone up twelvefold since early 2023. The company’s market cap at this moment is $4.5 trillion. Its ascent to becoming the world’s most valuable company is faster than anything the market has seen previously. But Burry has a track record that’s complicated. He called the housing crisis, which brought him great acclaim. But since 2008, he has been predicting various apocalypses pretty much constantly, earning him the label “permabear” from critics, while people who listen to him with a kind of cult-like devotion have missed some of the greatest bull runs in market history. Burry smartly bought GameStop early, for example, but he then sold his shares before the meme stock explosion. He shorted Tesla and lost a fortune. After his smart housing crisis call, frustrated investors actually fled his fund because of extended underperformance.
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Earlier this month, Burry deregistered his investment firm, Scion Asset Management, with the SEC. He said it was because of “regulatory and compliance restrictions that effectively muzzled my ability to communicate,” explaining that he was frustrated, watching people misinterpret his tweets on X.
Last weekend, he launched a Substack called “Cassandra Unchained” that he’s now using to prosecute his case against the entire AI industrial complex. The descriptor for the newsletter, a yearly subscription to which costs $400, is that it is now Burry’s “sole focus as he gives you a front row seat to his analytical efforts and projections for stocks, markets, and bubbles, often with an eye to history and its remarkably timeless patterns.”
People are definitely listening. The newsletter launched less than a week ago, and it already has 90,000 subscribers. Which brings us to the truly unsettling question hanging over all of this: Is Burry the canary in the coal mine, warning of a collapse that’s inevitable? Or could his fame, his track record, his now unrestricted voice, and a fast-growing audience trigger the very implosion he’s predicting?
History suggests this isn’t so crazy. Jim Chanos, the famous short seller, didn’t create Enron’s accounting fraud, but his high-profile criticisms in 2000 and 2001 gave other investors permission to question the company and accelerated its unraveling. Prominent hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s detailed takedown of Lehman Brothers’ accounting tricks at a 2008 conference made other investors more skeptical and may have hastened the loss of confidence that led to collapse. In both cases, the underlying problems were real, but a credible critic with a platform created a crisis of confidence that became self-fulfilling.
If enough investors believe Burry about AI overbuilding, they will sell. The selling will validate his bearish thesis. More investors will sell. Burry doesn’t need to be right about every detail – he just needs to be persuasive enough to trigger the stampede. Looking at Nvidia’s November performance, it’s easy to conclude Burry’s warnings are taking hold; seeing its shares’ performance over the entire year, it’s less obvious that’s the case.
Much clearer is that Nvidia has everything to lose, including an almost mind-blowingly massive market cap and its position as the most indispensable company of the AI age. Meanwhile, Burry has nothing to lose but his reputation and a new megaphone that he’ll presumably be using at full volume for the foreseeable future.
