There are men who wake up one morning, look at the global financial system, rub their eyes, and say, “Oh, this whole thing is about to catch fire.” That’s Michael Burry. He’s not a TV-studio mascot like Jim Cramer, who delivers financial advice with the precision of a man trying to swat a mosquito with a bowling ball. Burry’s different. He stares at numbers until they confess. He sees patterns other people miss. And, worst of all for his critics, he’s often correct.
Now he’s back with three big predictions about Bitcoin, Palantir and the AI boom. One doomed, one dangerous, one delusional. And what’s remarkable isn’t just his accuracy, but that the public still treats him as if he’s some eccentric muttering at a barbeque while everyone else tries to enjoy the potato salad.
Start with Bitcoin, Burry’s favorite punching bag. According to him, Bitcoin is the “tulip bulb” of our era. And he doesn’t mean that in a cute, academic way. Burry isn’t subtle. He doesn’t hedge. Bitcoin hitting $100,000 is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. And remember this is a man who spent years watching Wall Street pretend subprime mortgages were fine.
He calls Bitcoin “worthless,” which offends crypto believers. Bitcoin has passionate defenders, and they’ll tell you it’s “digital gold.” Burry sees something closer to digital compost. He sees an asset driven by hype, anxiety, and the irresistible urge for bored men online to pretend they’re hedge-fund wizards. He also points out that Bitcoin has fueled more criminal activity than any tulip ever did.
Then we get to Palantir. Burry doesn’t call it worthless, but over-worshipped. It’s a company that sells itself as the technological equivalent of Merlin, able to conjure predictions, patterns, and national-security magic with a few elegant lines of code. Palantir’s interesting. It does serious work. It’s also surrounded by people who think the company is one patriotic sneeze away from becoming the most valuable business on Earth. Burry sees the gap between ambition and reality. And once again, he bets against the delusion.
But it’s his third prediction—the AI bubble—that really shows why he remains influential. While most investors are sprinting around shouting “AI will solve everything!” Burry’s calmly pointing at the wobbling tower of hype and asking a very reasonable question: “Have any of you actually looked at the numbers?”
He compares Nvidia to Cisco in the late-1990s—the dotcom darling that skyrocketed to world-dominating heights before crashing so hard. Nvidia’s rise is astonishing. It’s also suspicious in the way all bubbles are suspicious. Lots of cheering, optimism, and an uncomfortable sense that nobody wants to check the structural integrity.
Burry notes the circular funding—billions bouncing from OpenAI to Nvidia to Anthropic to Microsoft, like a group of tech bros passing around the same $20 to pretend they’re all rich. He sees the mania and overconfidence. He sees companies buying Nvidia chips not because they need them, but because they’re terrified of being the only one not hoarding GPUs like canned food before a hurricane.
And this is where Burry’s genius shines. He doesn’t hate technology or progress. He hates stupidity. And he sees stupidity everywhere—in valuations that have floated away from reality, in companies shouting “AI!” like it’s a magic spell, and in investors behaving as if this time the laws of gravity are just taking a nap.
Why does Burry get mocked? People don’t like prophets during good weather. It’s far more pleasant to believe the party will last forever. But when Burry quietly deregistered Scion and stopped managing outside money, it wasn’t a retreat. It was a warning.