저자: NicolasChéron/주대상인물:MichaelBurry · 외국인
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마이클 버리의 2008년 서브프라임 공매도 성공 배경과 인생을 소개하고, 2025~2026년 AI 관련 과잉투자(감가상각 연장 회계 문제, 엔비디아-오픈AI 순환거래, 대규모 사모 자금 조달 구조)를 거품으로 주장하며 엔비디아·팔란티어·오라클·Nebius 등 AI 관련주에 대해 베팅한다는 내용. 1999년 통신 버블(Cisco) 사례와 비교. 명시적 가격 수치는 과거 중심, 미래 방향은 '거품 붕괴' 취지.
다듬은 글
At the end of 2004, in an office in California, a man started doing something that almost no one on Wall Street wanted to do. Read the documents that lie behind the enormous pre-real estate portfolios. This man is nothing like a typical financier. He is a former doctor, a neurology intern who traded his stethoscope for Excel spreadsheets.
While the rest of the world has its eyes wide open to a stock market reaching record highs, he seems to know a truth that no one wants to hear. And for good reason, he sees the collapse of the global financial system . He is so convinced of this that he decides to bet hundreds of millions of dollars against the American economy through his investment fund.
His own clients call him crazy, his associates sue him relentlessly, and the big bankers make fun of him. Yet, when the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2008 and plunged the planet into chaos, this man pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. His name travels around the world. Dr. Michael Bury becomes a star.
This victory hides a personal and professional tragedy because in the financial markets, being right before everyone else is torture. Until the truth comes out, you look like an incompetent who is wasting other people's money. This is what is called the Cassandra syndrome, the story of a prophetess from Greek mythology condemned to know the future without anyone ever believing her.
It just so happens that this is also Michael Burry's social media handle. Today, after years of silence, this extraordinary investor has identified a new flaw at the heart of the greatest technological revolution of our time, artificial intelligence. And once again , he decided to bet everything against the general euphoria.
This is the fascinating story of the investor who was right too soon. Michael Burry was born on June 19, 1971 in Saint-José, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and his life took a dramatic turn very early on. At the age of 2, a rare disease caused him to lose his left eye. The constraint will require him to wear an ocular prosthesis for the rest of his life.
This physical characteristic led him to a form of solitude at a very young age. He is unhappy with the way others look at him. He will tend to have a very introverted demeanor. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence immersed in books. His curiosity first led him to study economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, before pursuing medical studies and obtaining his doctorate in 1997 from Vanerbilt University.
He became a neurology intern at Stanford Hospital . But his mind is elsewhere. It was during the night shifts that a turning point occurred. During these rest hours, instead of relieving the pressure, he locks himself away to poring over the financial reports of publicly traded companies. He analyzes the reports as he might analyze a patient's scans, searching for the slightest anomaly.
Without any formal training in finance, he began publishing his analyses on online forums. It is based on a meticulous search for the true value of companies. And the least we can say [musically] is that they are precise. In the year 2000, in the midst of the speculative frenzy of the internet bubble, he sensed the wind changing.
He is leaving medicine permanently to create his own capital investment fund . To start, he gathered family capital consisting of an inheritance and close relatives. All this while he is still a long way from having repaid the pre-student who financed his studies. But at that precise moment, he possesses a decisive advantage over the rest of the world without even knowing its true origin.
Before we continue, a quick aside: if this type of content interests you, I highly recommend you subscribe to my newsletter. What I post on social media on a daily basis is just the tip of the iceberg. In a newsletter, we go much further. I regularly invite French-speaking managers and specialists to delve into the financial markets.
It's free, I only send two per month and you are already more than 70,000 investors receiving it. So if you want to join us, just click on the first link in the description below the video. Okay, let's go back . It was only a few years later, while observing his own son's behavior during a medical consultation, that Michael Burry discovered that he himself had Asperger's syndrome.
For most people, it's a communication disorder, but he's going to turn it into an asset. Michael has no social pressure. He doesn't really feel the need to be loved and seems completely impervious to the crowd movement in the markets. He is capable of locking himself away for days to conduct his research, cut off from the world.
As he would later say himself, he looks at the raw data while all the other players in finance look at each other to see what to think. During these early years of operation, its fund consistently beat the SNP 500 index by a considerable margin. In 2001, while the index fell by almost 12%, Michael Burry recorded a gain of more than 55 %.
His capital became a respected benchmark, but the real challenge came when he decided to dive headfirst into the American real estate market . We're back at the office in California. In 2005, Michael Berry decided to dissect the pre-real estate files granted to modest households and he discovered a reality that major rating agencies and central banks refused to see.
The American housing market is not based on solid growth, but on a toxic credit structure, what has been called the infamous subprime mortgages. Banks lend crazy sums to insolvent borrowers, often without requiring proof of income, applying very low promotional rates which will logically explode year after year.
Michael is doing his calculations. He models precisely that from 2007, when these interest rates climb, millions of Americans will find themselves unable to pay their monthly installments and the consequences will have a domino effect on the rest of the economy. He then decides to mount an unprecedented operation.
He goes to the biggest banks on Wall Street, Goldman Sax and Deutsch Bank, to ask them to create a tailor-made financial instrument for him: insurance contracts against default on these real estate debt packages. The bankers welcome him with open arms. American real estate prices never fall on a national scale.
They believe this former doctor is offering them millions of dollars of easy money in the form of monthly insurance premiums. And for a while, that's exactly what happens. To keep his bet alive, he has to pay millions of dollars each month to bank counterparties. In 2005 and 2006, while the housing bubble continued to inflate and the markets rose ever higher, his investment fund recorded negative performance.
The tension rises a notch every week. His own investors are in a panic. They watch their money evaporate in what they consider a foolish bet. They demand to get their marble back immediately . Faced with this revolt, Michael refuses to give in. Convinced that liquidating the position would be madness, he uses a clause in his articles of association to block his clients' withdrawals on more than half of their funds.
His long-time partners, including Joël Grimblat, stormed into his office in a rage, threatening him with legal action. Michael is isolated, attacked from all sides, but he holds on. He shuts himself away, just as he did during his adolescence. He knows he is right, but he also knows that every day the market is slow to open its eyes brings him a little closer to bankruptcy.
When the financial system finally imploded in 2007, the prophecy came true. The subprime market collapses, banks like Bernste crumble and insurance contracts for its capital see their value explode. The operation earned Michael Burry over $100 million and his clients, who had the courage to stay until the end, over $700 million.
But while he could savor this victory which makes him a living legend, deep down he is hurt, he feels ungrateful and despite his character, the personal attacks from those he had just enriched have deeply affected him. He made a radical decision in 2008, he closed his fund and withdrew from third- party asset management.
For several years, he turned to assets that had nothing to do with it. For example, he puts money into farmland rich in fresh water, probably a desire to return to simpler things. But for a mind obsessed with analysis and the search for anomalies, the lure of the markets remains too powerful. In 2013, he quietly relaunched a new investment structure.
A few years later, he would orchestrate behind the scenes one of the biggest stock market earthquakes of recent decades. Meanwhile, his life takes another dramatic turn, this time on the big screen. In December 2015, the film The Big Short, adapted from the book by Michael Lewis, was released in theaters.
On screen, his character is portrayed by superstar Christian Bale. The success is global. The film wins an Oscar and propels Michael Berry into a whole new dimension. Overnight, it no longer only appeals to the circle of finance. He becomes a pop culture icon, a modern-day hero of capitalism. Consequently, even the smallest of these messages on social media is analyzed and commented on by millions of people around the world.
His new epic can be summed up in one word: GameStop. the story of millions of anonymous small-time investors who came together on a Reddit forum to bring down large speculative investment funds that were betting on the demise of a video game store chain . For years it was believed to be a simple popular movement, but on closer inspection , we discover that long before the networks seized upon the phenomenon, there was a whistleblower, Michael Burry.
As early as the summer of 2019, when GameStop stock was stagnating below $4 and everyone was predicting its rapid bankruptcy in the face of online downloading, the investor quietly accumulated more than 3% of the company's capital. Looking at the accounts, he discovers that the company's total market value is less than the cash it holds in the bank.
On August 16, 2019, he sent a letter to the GameStop board of directors. And be warned, this letter is not a simple suggestion, it is an ultimatum. He is demanding the dismissal of the historical leaders and, above all, he wants to force the company to use its available cash to massively buy back the company's shares on the market.
Ten days later, in a second letter dated August 26, Michael Burry revealed the mechanics of the trap he had designed. This demonstrates that the large hedge funds have short-sold, meaning they bet on the decline, more than 60 % of all existing shares of the company. His plan is simple. If GameStop uses its money to buy back and cancel its own shares, the number of shares available on the stock exchange will collapse.
The short- selling funds will then find themselves trapped, forced to buy back tens of millions of shares in a market where there will be no more sellers. And that could cause the stock price to skyrocket. Kiss Gill, known by the pseudonym Roring Kitty, wrote directly to Michael Burry's team to express his admiration and draw inspiration from his plan.
A few weeks later, billionaire Ryan Cohen contacted Michael before buying a major stake in the company to take control. Under constant pressure, the board of directors gives in and buys $200 million worth of stock, reducing the outstanding shares by almost 30%. In December 2020, after putting the company back on track and preparing the ground for the stock market story that would follow, Michael Bury sold his position with a gain of over $100 million.
A few weeks later, the trap he had modeled closed. The stock exploded by more than 10000%, enough to ruin some vulture funds on Wall Street that had participated in its fall. But once again, despite this stroke of genius, our main character will once again face a wall. In the United States, financial regulations require any major manager to publish every 3 months a public document detailing all of its stock market positions with a delay of several weeks.
For Michael Bury, this transparency system is a burden. Each quarter, the financial press and traders around the world dissect every line of his portfolio, interpreting temporary hedges as definitive convictions, which creates unjustified panic movements on securities that he has sometimes already sold.
Compliance rules prevent him from speaking freely or clarifying his analyses under penalty of sanction from regulatory authorities. At the end of 2025, a new regulatory filing triggers a shockwave in the markets. The document reveals that its fund has liquidated almost all of its traditional investments to concentrate the bulk of its resources on short bets against the biggest tech companies, particularly targeting artificial intelligence giants like Nvidia and Palentir.
The very next day, targeted shares plummeted under the simple weight of the announcement of his name. But unlike the SC Prime crisis, Michael refuses to relive the trauma of 2008 and be held hostage by the demands of customers who want to exit or by administrative constraints. At the end of that same year, he terminated his fund with the financial authorities.
He returns the money to outside investors and decides to manage only his own family capital from now on. And rather than let the media write history for him, he decides to counterattack. To make his voice heard unfiltered, he launched his own independent newsletter on the Substacle platform called Cassandra Unchained.
The unleashed Cassand, always linked to the Greek myth. More than 300,000 readers pay up to $40 a month to follow these analyses delivered directly to their email inbox. By breaking ties with traditional industry, he affords himself the most precious luxury: time. The time to wait for these predictions to come true without having to answer to anyone.
And as I just said, the object of his new crusade is none other than the greatest stock market euphoria of our time. Michael Burry decides to tackle artificial intelligence, but not out of rejection of the technology itself . Michael already recognized the importance of the internet at the turn of the millennium.
Today, he does not dispute the impressive capabilities of new language models at all. His attack is of a completely different nature. She is an accountant. In his newsletter, he draws a parallel between the current frenzy and the great telecommunications bubble of the late 1990s. At the time, investors were not only betting on small, dubious start-ups, but on extremely profitable hardware manufacturers like Cisco, which sold the fiber optic cables and routers needed to build the internet network.
Everyone thought that the demand for physical equipment would grow indefinitely, but once the networks were built, operators realized that they had installed a capacity far exceeding the actual needs of users. Demand for equipment collapsed overnight and the share prices of the companies involved plummeted by more than 80%.
Today, according to Michael Berry, cloud and technology giants are repeating exactly the same mistake. They have embarked on gigantic spending plans amounting to trillions of dollars to build giant data centers and purchase millions of specialized electronic chips. The graphs demonstrate that the intensity of current material investment relative to the actual size of the economy far exceeds the peaks reached during the Y2K bubble and the 2007 housing bubble.
Businesses are mistaking a speculative race for sustainable commercial demand . The core of the problem denounced by Michael Burry is what he calls the accounting illusion about the lifespan of equipment. When a company buys billions of dollars more of the latest generation, this expense is not immediately deducted from its profits.
It is amortized and has been recorded over several years in the accounting records. To preserve the appearance of record profits, several industry giants have recently extended the depreciation period of their equipment in their tax returns, increasing it from 4 to 6 years. According to him, this accounting decision is simply absurd.
A chip specializing in artificial intelligence ages at a much faster rate than that. After only 2 to 3 years, a new, more powerful and less energy-intensive generation makes it technically obsolete for running the latest models. If the chips actually need to be replaced every 3 years when they are amortized over 6 years in the accounting books, the balance sheets are filled with phantom assets that are no longer worth anything.
When boards of directors have to admit this reality and demand a return on investment, cash flow will tighten and demand for new processors is likely to slow down. In addition to that, large groups are investing billions in young artificial intelligence companies or in partner data centers . In return, these companies directly use this money to rent servers or purchase components for the group, which then records these flows as commercial sales.
This is particularly the case with the partnership between Nvidia and Open AI in September 2025. This loop creates an illusion of prosperity that masks the absence of real customers outside the ecosystem. During the summer of 2026, Nvidia announced an alliance with some of the largest asset management funds on Wall Street, including BlackRock and Blackstone, to inject more than $500 billion of private capital to finance future computing infrastructure.
The idea put forward by the bankers and industries is simple to understand. Computing power should be considered as a new class of sovereign assets, on par with real estate, for example. Instead of forcing companies to buy servers with their own reserves, these financial platforms propose to issue loans guaranteed by the value of the servers themselves to transform their debts into financial products sold to pension funds and insurance companies.
For Michael Burry, this announcement is a wake-up call. He speaks up to make a comparison without using any tact. This attempt to transform technological equipment into a secure financial asset is reminiscent of the schemes that led to the bankruptcy of energy giant Enron in 2001. According to him, long-term debt cannot be guaranteed with a financial guarantee that loses half its value in a few months.
Faced with what he analyzes as an imminent bubble, Michael Berry takes action in his personal portfolios. He is strengthening his bearish bets against industry giants, chip manufacturer Nvidia, but also major software publishers like Palentir and Oracle whose valuations seem to him disconnected from reality.
It also targets cloud players like Nebus, takes positions against the entire semiconductor industry via TFS2X and even attacks construction equipment giant Caterpillar. It may seem completely random, but through a domino effect, he anticipates a sudden slowdown in the construction of future data centers.
To protect his capital, he combines his bearish bets with investments in traditional and defensive companies in the health or real economy sectors. Wall Street has a very short memory. With each new tech bubble, bankers and analysts repeat the same magic phrase. This time it's different. For Michael Burry, nothing is ever different.
The graphics change, the rhetoric adapts, but human nature remains the same. A mixture of blindness, arrogance, and greed. By leaving the traditional system to manage his own money, the former doctor solved his biggest dilemma. He no longer has anyone to convince. In the markets, the question has never been whether the figures eventually catch up with the promises.
The only unknown is how long it will take for reality to knock on the door. And when that day comes, no one will be able to say that you weren't warned. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to the channel. This will please the whole team. And I'll see you very soon on our YouTube channel.
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