Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame has pivoted from investing to writing, launching a paywalled Substack called “Cassandra Unchained.”
The blog is now Burry’s “sole focus” and promises 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.”
Burry has published two initial posts, one titled “Foundations: My 1999 (and part of 2000)” and the other titled “The Cardinal Sign of a Bubble: Supply-Side Gluttony.”
The former recalls his time as a neurology resident at Stanford University Hospital, where he wrote about value investing at night.
“As I devote myself to Cassandra Unchained, I find myself on an old road not taken,” it reads. “I feel lucky, and I am grateful for the opportunity as I walk it again.”
The second post aims straight at the heart of the AI boom, which he calls a “glorious folly” that will require investigation over several posts to break down.
Burry goes on to take aim at a common argument about the difference between the dot-com bubble and AI boom — that the companies 25 years ago were largely unprofitable while the current crop are money-printing machines.
At the turn of this century, Burry writes, the Nasdaq was driven by “highly profitable large caps, among which were the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’ of the era — Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco.”
He writes that a key issue with the dot-com bubble was “catastrophically overbuilt supply and nowhere near enough demand,” before adding that it’s “just not so different this time, try as so many might do to make it so.”
Burry calls out the “five public horsemen of today’s AI boom — Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Oracle” along with “several adolescent startups” including Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
“And once again there is a Cisco at the center of it all, with the picks and shovels for all and the expansive vision to go with it,” he writes, after noting that Cisco plunged 78% during the dot-com crash. “Its name is Nvidia.”
Burry finished that post with a quote from Buffett’s late business partner, Charlie Munger: “If you go around popping a lot of balloons, you are not going to be the most popular fellow in the room.”
The market veteran unveiled his blog on X, where he goes by “Cassandra” in reference to the priestess from Greek mythology who was cursed to speak true prophecies but never to be believed. Warren Buffett described Burry and John Paulson as “Cassandras” for predicting the mid-2000s housing market crash that ignited a global financial crisis.
Burry recently terminated Scion Asset Management’s SEC registration, closing his hedge fund to outside cash. He returned to X after more than two years in late October, marking his comeback with a coded post suggesting the AI boom is a bubble and the “only winning move is not to play.”
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