Michael Burry, the investor who became famous for betting against the housing market before the 2008 financial crisis (and getting immortalized in "The Big Short"), just made his boldest career move in years. He's shuttered his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, to go all-in on something decidedly more modern: a paid Substack newsletter.
The newsletter, called "Cassandra Unchained," represents a dramatic shift for Burry, who spent years delivering market warnings through cryptic tweets that he'd delete almost immediately after posting. Investors became accustomed to frantically screenshotting his posts before they vanished. Now he's committing to long-form, subscription-based analysis, formalizing his role as Wall Street's resident contrarian-in-chief.
And he's wasting no time going after big targets. Burry has already set his sights on the driving force behind the current market rally: artificial intelligence. In a piece titled "The Cardinal Sign of a Bubble: Supply-Side Gluttony," he rejected the notion that "this time is different," drawing parallels to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, according to Financial Express.
His primary target? Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), the chipmaker that's become synonymous with the AI revolution. Burry compared Nvidia to Cisco, the networking giant that built much of the internet's infrastructure before watching its valuation collapse spectacularly. The comparison is pointed: Cisco was essential to the internet boom, but that didn't save investors when reality caught up with hype.
Burry's thesis centers on what he sees as massive oversupply. He argues that companies are spending enormous sums building AI infrastructure, creating excess capacity that actual demand may never justify. He calls the entire phenomenon a "glorious folly," suggesting the spending spree is creating catastrophic imbalances in the market.
The newsletter costs $39 and promises "one or more pieces" each week. In the About section, Burry explains the focus will be on "stocks, market and economic trends, special situations, and investment manias," all informed by "the true stories, hard lessons, and empiric mental models from 25 years of professional portfolio management."
"I am not retired. This has my full attention. There is still nothing I enjoy more than analyzing companies and markets each and every day," Burry wrote, making clear this isn't a side project or semi-retirement move.
For someone who built his reputation on spotting bubbles before they burst, launching a paid newsletter to warn about AI excess is certainly on-brand. Whether he's right this time remains to be seen, but at least now his warnings won't disappear before anyone can read them.