The Big Short Yet Again?

The Wall Street Journal reports Michael Burry Bets He Isn't Too Early to Go Against the AI Juggernaut

Michael Burry has seen this movie before.

Take, for instance, the scene in "The Big Short" in which Christian Bale—who is playing Burry—tells investors about his bet against the U.S. housing market. If he is right, the market collapses and the hedge-fund manager will collect a $700 million jackpot on insurancelike contracts. If not, he will be insolvent in a few quarters.

"Watch. It will pay," the fictional Burry says. "I may have been early, but I'm not wrong."

"It's the same thing!" an investor yells back.

Now, Burry (the real one) is trying to convince Wall Street that he can profit off a fall of the artificial-intelligence companies Nvidia NVDA and Palantir Technologies PLTR. The industry has underpinned the market's rally to new highs throughout the year, but Burry, who has mostly kept a low profile this past decade, has emerged to pronounce there is a bubble that soon enough will pop.

The problem? He isn't sure when.

"Michael, if he had one failing in the dot-com cycle, it was being early to the process. The housing bubble? It was being early to the process," said Michael Green, a former hedge-fund manager who is now chief strategist at the active-ETF manager Simplify Asset Management and who, like Burry, has warned against popular trends—in his case, passive investing. "This is a significant issue, right? How quickly does this end?"

Warren Buffett once called him a Cassandra—the mythological Trojan priestess whose grim prophecies were ignored. Since his successful bet against the housing market, Burry has amassed a legion of online fans who pore over his posts in forums including Reddit's Burryology. He has embraced this persona. On X, he is known as Cassandra Unchained, and he posts screenshots of Bale from the movie version of his life to his million-plus followers.

Many of Burry's most-dramatic predictions about market crashes have been wrong during the past 15 years. In a gnomic Jan. 31, 2023, post he urged his followers to "SELL." While Silicon Valley Bank cratered two months later, the S&P 500 index has risen around 70% since then, and he has said that it was the wrong call.