Michael Barry attends the New York premiere of ‘The Big Short’ at the Ziegfeld Theater on November 23, 2015 in New York City.
Jim Spellman | Wire Images | Getty Images
After deregistering his hedge fund, Michael Burry, the investor who gained fame before 2008 for causing the housing crash, launched the Substack Newsletter to detail his increasingly bearish theories on artificial intelligence.
“The Big Short” investor is capitalizing on the huge audience he has built with X, with his 1.6 million followers long parsing his cryptic posts. His new publication, titled “Cassandra Unchained,” which costs $379 per year, comes with a familiar warning: He believes the market is once again deep in bubble territory.
In announcing the launch, Berry offered his perspective, noting the similarities between the tech mania of the late 1990s and today’s rush into AI, and how the bubble has been ignored by policymakers.
“February 21, 2000: SF Chronicle says Amazon is running out. Greenspan 2005: “A bubble in home prices…seems unlikely.” (Fed Chairman Jerome) Powell ’25: “AI companies are actually… making profits…That’s another thing. “I wasn’t sure if I should come back. I’m back. Please join me,” Berry wrote in an X post Sunday night.
He highlighted then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s assertion in 2005 that U.S. home prices showed no signs of a bubble, just two years before the subprime collapse justified Barry’s famous “Big Short.” And now, he argues, history is rhyming again.
As in the dot-com era, he believes investors are assuming that technology will rewrite the economy, ignoring profitability concerns, speculating on exponential growth, and funding massive capital expenditures.
The investor said Powell dismissed concerns about a bubble, saying AI companies are “actually making money” and calling it “different” from past booms.
“This is different in the sense that these companies, these highly valued companies, are actually generating revenue and so on,” Powell said at an October press conference.
Berry took this as an eerie echo of the assurances Greenspan had provided 20 years earlier. At the height of the dot-com boom, Barry openly promoted Amazon. Now he’s openly bearish on the offspring of the AI boom. Nvidia and Palantir.
