While you’ve been sweating the details over Thanksgiving, famed investor Michael Burry – the one portrayed by Christian Bale played in “The Big Short” – has been waging an increasingly aggressive war against Nvidia.
It’s a battle worth watching because Burry might actually win it. What makes this different from every other warning about an AI bubble is that Burry now has the audience and the freedom from regulatory constraints to potentially become the catalyst for the very collapse he’s predicting. He’s betting against the AI boom, but he’s also proactively trying to convince his growing number of followers that the emperor – Nvidia – has no clothes.
What everyone is now wondering is whether Burry can create enough doubt to truly hobble Nvidia and, by association, the other main characters in this story, including OpenAI.
Burry has really thrown himself into the effort in recent weeks. He’s been slinging mud at Nvidia; he also traded nasty comments with Palantir CEO Alex Karp after regulatory filings revealed Burry held bearish put options on both companies – a bet worth over $1 billion that they’d crash. (Karp went on CNBC and called Burry’s strategy “batshit crazy,” to which Burry responded by mocking Karp for not understanding how to read an SEC filing.) The spat encapsulates the market’s central divide: is AI going to transform everything and thus worth every billion invested, or are we now in mania territory that’s destined to end badly?
Burry’s allegations are specific and damning. He says Nvidia’s stock-based compensation has cost shareholders $112.5 billion, essentially “reducing owner’s earnings by 50%.” He has suggested that AI companies are cooking their books by slow-walking depreciation on equipment that’s losing value fast. (Burry believes that Nvidia customers are overstating the useful lives of Nvidia’s GPUs in order to justify run …