Legendary Investor Bets on the AI Crash (Video)

In this 3 October 2026 published video, hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian talk about how Michael Burry, the legendary investor famously portrayed in The Big Short for predicting the 2008 housing crisis, has aggressively positioned his portfolio for an imminent AI market crash. After spending months warning of a massive asset bubble, Burry dramatically accelerated his timeline, shifting his bearish bets from straight short positions into high-leverage put options expiring through late 2027. He openly declared that the AI bubble is fraying and could pop “sooner than later,” aggressively targeting the sector’s biggest winners.

Burry has systematically built up a short book targeting core AI infrastructure, hardware, and data analytics companies. Through his investment filings and updates via his private Substack (Cassandra Unchained), Burry revealed heavily leveraged put options against Nvidia (NVDA), Palantir (PLTR), Oracle (ORCL), Micron (MU), and Nebius (NBIS). Beyond individual tech heavyweights, Burry has bought put options against the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) index and the SOXX semiconductor ETF, betting that the broader tech ecosystem will face a deep, systemic correction. By swapping out standard shorts for out-of-the-money puts, Burry explicitly stated he wanted “more leverage” because the bubble’s deflation timeline has moved up significantly. 

Burry’s thesis rests on clear structural cracks forming in the artificial intelligence economy. Famed tech firms are projected to spend over $4 trillion on data centers, chips, and models by 2029. However, Burry and economic critics emphasize a massive disparity: capital is flowing violently upstream to chipmakers, but the actual end-users and downstream enterprise clients are not generating enough real revenue to justify the astronomical capital expenditures. Burry has accused major AI tech companies of artificially inflating their numbers through an interconnected web of mutual dependence. Under this mechanism, tech giants lend cash to smaller AI startups or frontier labs, which then immediately turn around and spend those loaned billions to buy chips or cloud space from the very same tech giants—creating an illusion of high organic revenue. Burry alleges that AI hyperscalers are intentionally hiding slowing growth and masking capital strain by stretching out the estimated depreciation cycles of their servers and compute equipment to make short-term profits look larger than they are. Burry pointed directly at OpenAI as the next “Netscape”. He has argued that frontier labs face a financial bloodbath as computing costs soar, warning that if current hyper-concentrated venture capital and corporate spending slows even slightly, the entire infrastructure will collapse like a house of cards. 

While Burry’s warning has rattled retail investors, market bulls and tech executives point out distinct structural differences between today’s market and the 2000 dot-com crash. They argue that unlike the late 90s, where companies with no revenue went public on pure speculation, today’s AI leaders like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet are backed by historic, record-breaking corporate cash flows and real utility. 

https://youtu.be/EB1thrBaq9c