Michael Burry Is Shorting Nvidia And Palantir; Early, Wrong, Neither, Or Both?

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Photo by Yorgos Ntrahas on Unsplash
 

Investor made famous by ‘The Big Short’ is shorting Nvidia and Palantir.

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.

After publication of this article, Burry took to X to defended his record, including his 2023 call.

“Two banks failed, market fell, I corrected myself at the bottom and suggested it was all clear to buy again,” he posted.

Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir called Burry “bats—crazy” on CNBC.

On Nov. 3, Burry revealed a bet against Nvidia, the chip maker that is now the world’s most-valuable company, and Palantir, a major AI software business. Together, they account for about $5 trillion in market value. Burry’s bets were relatively small, about $10 million in put options, but could amount to more than $1 billion if those stocks drop significantly.

Is Michael Burry Shutting His Fund Just Before He’s About to Be Proved Right?

On November 18, 2025, Yahoo!Finance asked Is Michael Burry Shutting His Fund Just Before He’s About to Be Proved Right?

Michael Burry, the investor immortalized in “The Big Short” for predicting the 2008 housing crash, recently sent shockwaves through markets again. In his third-quarter filings, his Scion Asset Management revealed massive put options against Nvidia and Palantir Technologies, signaling deep skepticism about artificial intelligence (AI)-driven valuations detached from fundamentals. These bets positioned him to profit if high-flying AI stocks corrected sharply.

Then came a surprising reversal — not by covering his short positions or embracing the AI narrative, but by deregistering Scion Asset Management with the SEC, effectively closing the hedge fund and returning outside capital to investors by year-end.

In a letter to his investors, Burry explained his valuation views have been out of sync with markets for some time, implying it was unwise to manage others’ money amid such divergence. This echoes his 2008 closure of Scion Capital, when client pressure mounted before his housing bet paid off.

The Best Shorts

The best shorts are companies headed to zero, not companies with massive profits like Nvidia.

In the DotCom years, many companies went bankrupt. Global Crossing, Enron, and WorldCom come to mind.

The same happened in the Great Recession with leveraged housing players. Lehman was at the top of the list.

Nvidia is a valuation short. This setup is not the same thing.

That’s not a prediction that Burry will be wrong, it’s a word of caution that it is a hugely risky strategy.

I think the market is hugely overvalued. But valuation plays are not the best shorts.


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