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On September 29th, Michael Burry, the investor from The Big Short, posted a sentence on X that's hard to forget. For the benefit of humanity, the markets should tank hard and prevent the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. Read that again. A famous investor is publicly hoping for a market crash so that two companies can't sell shares to the public.
And those two companies are not small. OpenAI has confidentially filed paperwork to go public, and its finance chief has said it will be public in 2027 or sooner. Anthropic is reportedly aiming for mid-November with a reported target of up to a hundred billion dollars. Reported, not confirmed. Why does an IPO matter here?
When a company sells shares to the public, buyers send money in and the company spends it. That money has to come from somewhere. Other stocks, funds, savings. Burry's claim is twofold, that these two will pull enormous sums out of other stocks and then fail to earn it back. That is his claim, not a fact.
So, why would he want to stop these IPOs? And does he have a point? Or is this a man who's early, again? Today, I'll show you what he's betting on, what the last great IPO boom did next, and the one thing his story teaches about your own money. Start with who's talking. In 2005, Burry looked at the housing market and bet against it using contracts that paid off if mortgage bonds failed.
And here's the part people forget. He was early. For a long stretch, the bet cost him. Even some of his own investors doubted him and tried to pull their money out. Then, in 2007 and 2008, the housing market cracked, and the investors who stayed made large profits. That's the legend, and it's why people listen when Burry speaks.
But the legend has a second lesson, and it's the one I want you to hold on to. Being right and being early feel exactly the same for a long time. From the outside, they look like being wrong. A famous win makes the next call sound surer than it is. Now, what is he doing today? A week before that post, he wrote on his Substack that he shorted more of three stocks and a chip fund, Micron, Nvidia, Palantir, and a semiconductor ETF.
His words, "I did this in some size. A short is a bet that a price will fall." A short has a nasty feature. If the price falls, the most you can make is the stock's whole price. If it rises, your loss has no ceiling. That's why shorting something that keeps climbing is so painful and why being early on a short is so expensive.
And notice where this comes from. It's his own disclosure, not a regulatory filing, and it gives no dollar amounts. So, we know the direction of his bets, not their size. The worry that critics of the boom describe is a loop. AI companies buy chips, chip stocks rise, rising stocks make it easier to raise money and spend more, and that spending flows back to the chip makers.
That loop is the thing he is betting against. In a reply to his own post, Burry wrote that these companies would suck up and then destroy trillions of dollars of capital. And this week showed how shaky the numbers are. On October 8th, the Financial Times reported that Open AI's annualized revenue was about $50 billion at the end of September, not the 70 billion some investors had been repeating.
That 70 came from investors trying to compare Open AI with Anthropic, which reports revenue on a different basis. Open AI reportedly expects to reach 70 billion by the end of the year. Whatever you make of that, the fastest growing companies in the market are being valued on numbers that people are still arguing over.
Now, the history, because there is a parallel Burry would know. December 5th, 1996, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, gives a speech and asks, "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?" Now, fast forward. At the end of that month, the NASDAQ 100 stood at about 821.
By March 2000, it was at about 4,398, more than five times higher. The alarm came more than three years early. And during those years, IPOs exploded. In 1999 alone, about 476 companies listed, and the average one jumped about 71% on its first day, according to Jay Ritter of the University of Florida.
And the IPO boom ran right through 2000. That year, another 380 companies listed with an average first-day jump of about 56%. Then came the crash. From March 2000 to September 2002, the NASDAQ 100 fell about 81%. It didn't get back above its March 2000 level until early 2015. Now, this is history, not a forecast.
IPO waves have coincided with market tops, but the gap between warning and top was long, and nothing here shows IPOs caused them. And today's leaders have real revenue, tens of billions of dollars a year. That is a real difference from 1999, and it's the bulls' best argument. You might say he's talking his book, meaning he's promoting a position he profits from.
And you'd have a point. By his own account, Burry is short these stocks. If they fall, he gains. That doesn't make him wrong, but it means his post is an opinion from someone with something to win, and it should be read that way. And the other side has an argument, too. One commentator, quoted by Yahoo Finance, Jack Raines, said OpenAI and Anthropic need to go public now, because the private markets are basically tapped out.
You can read that as hunger for cash or as a sign the boom needs fresh money to keep going. The evidence doesn't settle it. And here's something to watch that isn't an opinion. For Anthropics reported mid-November listing, a public filing is expected by late October. Those documents show actual revenue, costs, and risks, not leaks and estimates.
Read the numbers before the commentary, Burry's included. Which brings us to you. You don't have to decide whether Burry is right. Nobody can know that, including Burry. The real question is, if he's early, what does early cost me? Here's the arithmetic. If 30% of your money sits in stocks tied to one story, and that slice falls the way the Nasdaq 100 did from 2000 to 2002, about 81%, your whole portfolio loses about 24%.
At 10%, about 8%. That's not a forecast, it's a ruler. And it cuts both ways. If the bear is early, holders sit through more pain first. If the bear is wrong, anyone who sold in December 1996 missed a more than fivefold rise. Neither outcome is a plan. Both are why the size of a bet matters more than the story behind it.
So, here's the line to remember. Being early looks exactly like being wrong. One way to check yourself, ask how much of your money rides on one story, and ask what drop you could live with in dollars, not percent. Those two answers tell you more than any prediction, Burry's or anyone's. Not investment advice.
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