Michael Burry

• 1. Introduction

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  In November 2025, Michael Burry, an American investor, hedge fund manager and licensed physician, announced that he was shutting down his fund. He followed that decision with a Substack newsletter called Cassandra Unchained.

  Burry is best known for being among the first investors to predict the subprime mortgage crisis, and to profit from it. That crisis contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. How does a man trained in medicine end up betting against the housing market? What did that bet cost him before it paid off? And why does he keep sounding alarms about bubbles?

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• 2. Medicine First

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  Michael James Burry was born on the 19th of June 1971 and raised in San Jose, California. At the age of two, he lost his left eye to retinoblastoma. He has worn a prosthetic eye ever since. As a teenager, he attended Santa Teresa High School, a public school.

  At the University of California, Los Angeles, he studied economics and pre-med. In 1997, he earned an MD degree from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Stanford came next. He served as a neurology resident at Stanford Hospital, then as a pathology resident, and he completed neither residency. While off duty, he worked on his hobby, financial investing.

  Burry never went on to practice medicine. Even so, he has kept his physician license active with the Medical Board of California, including its continuing education requirements.

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• 3. Margin of Safety

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  Starting in 1996, Burry wrote about value investing on message boards at the stock discussion site Silicon Investor. His stock picks did so well that Vanguard and White Mountains Insurance Group took an interest. So did the prominent investor Joel Greenblatt. That reputation was in place when Burry left his residency to start a hedge fund.

  His understanding of value is strictly traditional. He has said more than once that his style rests on Security Analysis, the 1934 book by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. In his words: "All my stock picking is 100% based on the concept of a margin of safety."

  A report in the SF Chronicle dated the 21st of February 2000 described a short position that Burry held in Amazon. Over the following year, amid the dot-com bubble, Amazon lost about 80% of its value. In 2025, Burry pointed back to that call when announcing a newsletter about his fears of an AI bubble.

  In November 2000, Burry shut down his website and started the hedge fund Scion Capital. An inheritance and loans from his family paid for it. The fund quickly earned extraordinary profits for his investors. He took its name from The Scions of Shannara, a 1990 novel by Terry Brooks and one of his favorites.

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• 4. The Subprime Bet

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  In 2005, Burry began to focus on the subprime mortgage market. He had analyzed mortgage lending practices in 2003 and 2004. From that work he concluded that the real estate bubble would collapse, possibly as early as 2007.

  The weak point, he found, was the teaser rate. Subprime mortgages with these low introductory rates, and the bonds built on them, would start losing value once the rates were replaced by much higher ones. That could happen in as little as two years after a loan began.

  To act on this view, Burry persuaded Goldman Sachs and other investment firms to sell him credit default swaps. These are contracts that pay out if the underlying deals go bad. He chose them against subprime deals that he saw as vulnerable.

  Making the payments on those swaps tested his investors. Some of them doubted that his predictions were accurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Burry called it an investor revolt.

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• 5. Payoff and Verdict

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  Burry's analysis eventually proved correct. He made a personal profit of $100 million. The investors who remained in his fund shared a profit of more than $700 million.

  In 2008, after the revolt and the financial victory that followed it, Burry shut down Scion Capital.

  On the 3rd of April 2010, he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times. He argued that anyone who had studied the financial markets carefully in 2003-2004 and 2005 could have recognized the growing risk in subprime lending. He faulted federal regulators for failing to listen to warnings that came from outside a closed circle of advisers.

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• 6. Bubble Warnings

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  In 2013, Burry reopened the fund under the name Scion Asset Management. Its aim was to manage personal investments, which include water, farmland and gold.

  GameStop became a test of his reputation in 2021. Burry had been an investor in the company before it turned into a Reddit meme stock. Its value then skyrocketed and dropped in the short squeeze. He said he had sold the stock before its dramatic rise. As of January 2026, he said he was buying GameStop shares again, though not betting on more meme-stock mania.

  Also in 2021, Burry raised concerns about the hype around meme stocks, electric vehicles, software-as-a-service companies and bitcoin. He compared the mood to the dot-com bubble. The meme stock and crypto markets later collapsed, and he has continued to criticize cryptocurrencies. In February 2026, he released a chart comparing bitcoin's bearish state to the 2021-2022 plunge, suggesting the possibility of a deeper reset.

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• 7. The Newsletter Era

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  In 2025, Burry's 13-F filings, the holdings disclosures made to the SEC, revealed short positions in Nvidia and Palantir. He held them as put options. The positions ran against the general market consensus, and they sparked public interest online. Burry also posted on X, alluding to the idea of an "AI Bubble."

  Later filings showed Burry withdrawing Scion Asset Management from the SEC's registration. In a post on X in late November, he wrote, "On to much better things Nov 25th." The SEC database then showed Scion's registration status as terminated.

  On the 24th of November 2025, Burry announced Cassandra Unchained, a newsletter with a $379 annual fee. It would lay out his fears about an AI bubble, tied to his short positions in Nvidia and Palantir.

  In March 2026, Burry agreed with billionaire Bill Ackman's bullish call on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He also posted on X about stagnation in America's housing market. He pushed back on the narrative of a U.S. housing shortage, saying the issue is misallocation, not supply. He criticized federal policy and called for reform of the two companies.

  In April 2026, Burry shared a post by George Noble, a former Fidelity fund manager with over four decades on Wall Street. Noble criticized the proposal to add Elon Musk's SpaceX to the Nasdaq. He called it "the most SHAMELESS structural manipulation of a major index I've ever seen." Burry told his more than one million followers on X that it was a "must read." He noted that the stock could be added to 401(k)s within a few weeks of listing on the Nasdaq.

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• 8. Private Life and Portrayals

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  Burry is married. In 2010, he lived in Saratoga, California, with his two adult sons. One of them was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. After reading about the condition, Burry came to believe that he has it too.

  He was also highly critical of the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

  Christian Bale portrayed Burry in the 2015 film The Big Short. The story also reached readers in two books. Gregory Zuckerman published The Greatest Trade Ever in 2009. Michael Lewis followed with The Big Short in 2010, the same year Burry wrote his op-ed for The New York Times.

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