Michael Burry, a big short investor, shuts down the hedge fund Scion Capital

Michael Burry, a heavy-metal fan who ditched medicine for stock picking, rightly bet against the US mortgage market before the 2008 crisis Now he is worried about the AI boomPlenty of influential investors have been trimming or offloading stakes in Nvidia as the AI boom draws a growing number of sceptics But none has attracted attention quite as much as Michael Burry, says Bloomberg The hedge funder has gained notoriety for accurately predicting the US housing bubble prior to the 2008 financial crisis, as detailed in Michael Lewis' book The Big Short

"Were obsessed with contrarian investors" who make "concentrated hero bets on macro outcomes".

Burrys allure is especially strong among online retail investors, who have helped drive the values of firms such as data-intelligence specialist Palantir into the stratosphere, says the Financial Times. Hence the recent fury of the groups "voluble" boss, Alex Karp, when Burry informed his 1.4 million followers on X that he had taken a sizeable £900 million short position on Palantirs stock. Karp described Burry as "bat-crazy". Yet arguably, he has had the last laugh. In less than two weeks, Burry declared that he was closing his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management. For many pessimistic investors, this has been a "brutal era" as the stock market has been steadily rising.

Michael Burry is who?

At 54, Burry stands out even among the colourful characters who are attracted to short selling. A self-described loner (who has nevertheless married twice) he told Michael Lewis that "my nature is not to have friends Im happy in my own head". Born in 1971, and raised in San Jose, California, he lost his left eye to a rare form of cancer called retinoblastoma at the age of two and has worn a prosthetic eye ever since, says Investopedia. Later on, he realized that he has Aspergers syndrome as well. After studying English, economics and medicine at the University of California, Burry was initially bent on pursuing a medical career. "However, his new hobby picking stocks engaged him more than the messy world of medicine," the ft\. notes. After his residency ended in 2000, he left the medical field and founded an investment firm called Scion Capital, which was named after Terry Brooks' 1990 fantasy novel The Scions of Shannara.

Burry started out as a value investor, buying into unloved companies he felt were extremely undervalued. A lover of heavy metal, he developed a reputation as a head-banging, fiercely contrarian money manager. "If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are," he told Lewis. "The late 90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor I thought what everybody else was doing was insane. The "

By 2005, he had trained his focus on what a collapse of the US housing market would do to mortgage bonds later crediting his insights to his neurodiversity, says The Guardian. As he observed: "Only someone who has Aspergers would read a sub-prime mortgage-bond prospectus. Investors were incensed by Burry's choice to bet against the mortgage market because they believed he was giving up on a lucrative tactic. However, between November 2000 and June 2008, the fund returned 489 percent. Those investors who stuck with him made £700 million, while Burry made personal profits of £100 million.

Yet for many professionals, Burrys performance since then has been "distinctly ho-hum", says the ft\. Burry, who has launched a new subscription newsletter called Cassandra Unchained, has seemingly retired from investing before closing Scion Capital after his bets against subprime mortgage bonds paid off in 2008 before reopening as Scion Asset Management a few years later. As he wrote on X shortly before filing for the wind-down of his fund: "Sometimes we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is to not play. The "

Sometimes, we see bubbles. There is sometimes a way to address it.
Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play. pic . twitter . com/xNBSvjGgvsOctober 31, 2025.