Michael Burry rage‑quit Wall Street like it was a bad poker game. One moment, he was betting nearly $1 billion against Palantir, and the next, he was pulling the plug on his entire hedge fund.
A routine regulatory filing revealed that Scion Asset Management had piled into $912 million worth of put options against Palantir, just days before Burry told his investors, in plain language, that the market no longer made any sense to him.
On November 4, Palantir dropped almost 8% even though the company had reported stronger earnings the night before.
The filing also triggered a public outburst from Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, who rushed onto CNBC and lashed out at short sellers.
“When I hear short sellers attacking what I believe is clearly the most important software company in America, and therefore the world, in terms of our impact, simply to make money, and trying to call the AI revolution into question… [it] is super triggering to me,” he said.
Alex aimed the comment at Burry, who he believed was taking a swing at what he sees as Palantir’s central role in the AI wave.
Tracking Burry’s bets and Wall Street backlash
Even with the headline number attached to the puts, the actual outlay from Burry was only $9.2 million, and he later suggested that the position had already been closed.
Within days, the story shifted again when word spread that he was shutting down Scion Asset Management entirely. Alex got another moment to react publicly, as the investor who had tried to push his stock down exited the game altogether.
This hits during a period where bearish investors keep getting crushed. Names like Jim Chanos and Nate Anderson have closed their firms after years of fighting a market that keeps moving upward. It has been especially rough for people who question the AI boom, a mood that Burry made clear in a new letter to his investors.
He wrote, “My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.”
The letter landed at a time when the Nasdaq is down 3.6% for the month, and some fast-moving AI names, including Palantir, have fallen even harder.
Burry has argued that some major technology companies have boosted their earnings by extending the estimated lives of their AI servers to stretch depreciation costs.
Some investors, like Jim Tierney of AllianceBernstein, have pushed back and said, “Specific depreciation schedules are unlikely to be the gotcha issue,” noting that the practice was already understood in the market.
Tracing the man behind the market hit
The story around Burry always circles back to how he thinks. He lost an eye to retinoblastoma when he was two and wears a glass eye.
He has described himself as a loner and once told author Michael Lewis, “My nature is not to have friends. I’m happy in my own head.” He studied English, economics, and medicine at UCLA, then went to Vanderbilt for medical school and completed a residency at Stanford Hospital.
His interest in picking stocks became more compelling than medicine, and when his residency ended in 2000, he walked away to start his firm.
He called it Scion Capital, naming it after The Scions of Shannara, a 1990 fantasy novel by Terry Brooks. He became known for pushing against the market’s big bets. He once told Lewis, “If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are.
The late ’90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane.”
His fame exploded after the housing market collapsed. Christian Bale portrayed him in The Big Short film, and he built a cult following online, posting on X under the title Cassandra Unchained.
He picked the name after Warren Buffett once compared him to the Greek figure cursed with being right and ignored. His following climbed past 1.5 million users who studied every cryptic message he left.
Professionals have not always praised his post-2008 record. One veteran investor complained, “What are his other great calls since 2007? I’m so surprised he gets the publicity he gets.”
He had closed Scion Capital once before after his subprime bets paid off, then reopened it as Scion Asset Management. Now it may be happening again.
Shortly before filing the wind-down paperwork, Burry wrote on X, “Sometimes we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is to not play.”
