Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame has pivoted from investing to writing, launching a paywalled Substack called “Cassandra Unchained.”
Burry says the blog, which has amassed more than 23,000 subscribers since it went live on Sunday night, is now his “sole focus.” It promises a “front row seat to his analytical efforts and projections for stocks, markets, and bubbles, often with an eye to history and its remarkably timeless patterns.”
On his “About” page, Burry says he “left the hedge fund business” after 25 years to “focus on what I’ve always loved: writing and sharing investment ideas.”
He writes that managing clients’ money came with restrictions that “muzzled” him, meaning he could only share “cryptic fragments” publicly, whereas now he is “unchained.”
The newsletter costs $39 a month, or $379 annually. By comparison, Citrini Research — the most popular newsletter in Substack’s finance category — charges $125 a month, or $999 a year.
Burry has published two initial posts, one titled “Foundations: My 1999 (and part of 2000)” and the other titled “The Cardinal Sign of a Bubble: Supply-Side Gluttony.”
The former recalls his time as a neurology resident at Stanford University Hospital, where he wrote about value investing at night.
“As I devote myself to Cassandra Unchained, I find myself on an old road not taken,” it reads. “I feel lucky, and I am grateful for the opportunity as I walk it again.”
The second post aims straight at the heart of the AI boom, which he calls a “glorious folly” that will require investigation over several posts to break down.
Burry goes on to address a common argument about the difference between the dot-com bubble and AI boom — that the tech companies leading the charge 25 years ago were largely unprofitable, while the current crop are money-printing machines.
At the turn of this century, Burry writes, the Nasdaq was driven by “highly profitable large caps, among which were the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’ of the era — Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco.”
He writes that a key issue with the dot-com bubble was “catastrophically overbuilt supply and nowhere near enough demand,” before adding that it’s “just not so different this time, try as so many might do to make it so.”
Burry calls out the “five public horsemen of today’s AI boom — Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Oracle” along with “several adolescent startups” including Sam Altman’s OpenAI.