Michael Burry has never been shy about swimming against the current. The investor made famous by The Big Short — the Michael Lewis book and 2015 film chronicling his bet against the U.S. housing market before the 2008 crash — is once again positioned against the crowd. This time, his target is the artificial intelligence trade that has powered markets to record highs.
Burry shut down his fund, Scion Asset Management, in late 2025 and deregistered as an investment adviser. Freed from quarterly filings, he now discloses trades directly on his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, where he has spent months arguing that AI-related stocks are in a bubble comparable to the dot-com era.
On June 30, 2026, he put entry prices on that thesis. Burry disclosed short positions in Nvidia at $198.09, Tesla at $416.22, Caterpillar at $1,060.98, Applied Materials at $729.40, and the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) at $642.80. He also rolled his SOXX put options out to March 2027 at higher strike prices and continues to hold puts against the Nasdaq-100.
Two days later, he added Micron Technology to the list, shorting the memory maker near $1,052 after its AI-fueled run. Burry argued Micron is a chronic destroyer of capital, citing a median return on invested capital of roughly 4% and free cash flow that has been negative nearly half the time.
His broader case rests on valuation extremes. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, he notes, trades more than 65% above its 200-day moving average — a stretch seen only once before, in 2000 — with a price-to-sales ratio above 16. Stripping out Nvidia barely dents the number. Caterpillar caught his eye for similar reasons: the equipment maker gained 86% in the first half of 2026 as investors treated it as a proxy for AI data-center construction. It is the first time Burry has ever shorted the stock. “It is only a matter of time now,” he wrote.
He isn’t only short, though. On July 8 he revealed a full-sized long position in regulated sportsbooks, split roughly 60% Flutter Entertainment and 40% DraftKings, betting regulators will eventually rein in the prediction markets that have hammered both stocks. He has also been adding to longs in PayPal, Sprouts Farmers Market, Zoetis, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.
The obvious caveat: Burry has been early before, and in markets, early can look identical to wrong for uncomfortably long stretches. Skeptics have called the AI trade a bubble for more than two years while these stocks kept climbing, and his 2021 Tesla puts were covered well before that trade would have paid. A short-seller announcing positions changes nothing about the underlying businesses.
Still, when the man who called the housing collapse publishes entry prices against the market’s favorite stocks, people pay attention. Whether this proves to be his second act or another premature alarm, Burry has made his view unmistakable: the AI boom, as he sees it, is living on borrowed time.