Michael Burry
The 17 Years After The Big Short

The Big Short turned Michael Burry into a legend. A doctor with a glass eye on the autism spectrum who saw through the 2008 subprime crisis, making $100M for himself and $725M for his investors.

But this piece isn't going to retell that story. This piece is about the 17 years after — GameStop entered early, exited even earlier; Tesla short mistimed; long-term China tech holdings that turned around; a one-word "Sell" tweet in 2023 that he reversed on himself 8 weeks later; closing Scion and launching a Substack in November 2025; and his strange position on Bitcoin — never bought, never actually shorted.

What you can learn isn't "what crashes next" — it's a framework one person has validated repeatedly across 25 years.

1. The Night-Shift Trader From Medical School

Michael Burry was born June 19, 1971 in San Jose, California. At age 2 he lost his left eye to retinoblastoma and wore a glass eye from then on. He studied economics + pre-med at UCLA, went to medical school at Vanderbilt, and started his neurology residency at Stanford Hospital.

During his residency, he was seeing patients by day and writing stock analysis on the Silicon Investor forum by night. Those posts caught the attention of Joel Greenblatt(founder of Gotham Capital and author of You Can Be a Stock Market Genius). After reading his posts in 2000, Greenblatt cold-called him and offered roughly $1M for a 25% stake in Scion Capital.

That phone call was the trigger that turned Burry from a doctor into a full-time trader. In November 2000, using family inheritance plus borrowed funds, he founded Scion Capital out of a small office in Saratoga, California. The fund was named after one of his favorite fantasy novels, The Scions of Shannara.

Years later, in interviews he publicly acknowledged that he has Asperger's syndrome — something he only realized when his son was diagnosed and he saw himself on the same spectrum. Michael Lewis covers this in the original Big Short book, and Burry has confirmed it in multiple interviews since.

2. The Big Short — The Real Timeline

Between 2003 and 2004, Burry was reading reams of RMBS (residential mortgage-backed security) prospectuses and noticed something: a huge wave of ARM (adjustable-rate mortgage) teaser rates would reset in 2007. That was a specific, date-stamped catalyst — not a vague call like "real estate is overheated."

On May 19, 2005 he did his first CDS trade: buying $60M of credit default swaps on subprime MBS from Deutsche Bank. It was the first time in financial history an external investor had asked an investment bank to custom-write CDS like this. DB initially didn't even know how to price the spread.

He was also meticulous about counterparty selection. He specifically used Goldman, Deutsche, Morgan Stanley, BofA, UBS, Merrill, Citi, and explicitly avoided Bear Stearns and Lehman — because he predicted those two would fail if the housing market crashed. He wanted counterparties that would still be alive to pay him. That call turned out to be exactly right.

But through 2006 and 2007, the CDS premium kept burning cash and the housing market still hadn't cracked. LPs (the fund's investors) started revolting and demanding redemptions. Burry triggered the "side pocket" clause — locking the CDS positions away so they couldn't be redeemed. Joel Greenblatt himself flew out to warn him in person.

He held until late 2007, when the CDS finally exploded in value. From November 2000 to June 2008, Scion Capital delivered a net return of 489.34% (after fees). Investors made about $725M on the trade, and Burry personally made about $100M. But his relationship with his LPs was already broken. In June 2008 he wound down Scion Capital and later reopened under his own name as Scion Asset Management.

3. Scion 2.0 — The 16 Years The Movie Didn't Show

Starting in 2013, Scion Asset Management began filing 13Fs with the SEC. Those public filings are the best data source for tracking his actual trades(much better than his constantly-deleted X account).

The overall strategy shifted:

• Pivot toward small-cap value, abandoning mega-scale operations
• AUM oscillating between $100M and $300M, with him actively refusing to scale up — size hurts small-cap execution
• Almost all shorts via options (puts), not direct equity shorting — inheriting the choice from the Big Short trade

4. GameStop Out Too Early, Tesla Mistimed — Two Validations of the Framework

GameStop (GME): Burry first entered in summer 2018, added aggressively in July 2019, and sent an open letter to the board demanding $238M in share buybacks. The result: the Q4 2020 13F shows he had fully exited. A few weeks later (January 2021), the historic short squeeze happened. He publicly admitted afterward: "I had no idea that was going to happen next."

Tesla short: The Q1 2021 13F (filed in May) revealed he held Tesla put options on roughly 800,000-share equivalents, with notional around $534M. TSLA ripped that year, and he closed all the puts by Q4, walking away wounded.

These two trades show his discipline:

• Short positions (puts) get cut within 1-2 quarters if the thesis doesn't play out
• Long positions (China tech, which we'll get to) can sit for 2-3 years
• This asymmetry isn't a contradiction — it's by design: shorting has higher time cost than going long (premium decay)

5. The "Sell" Tweet: He Reversed Himself 8 Weeks Later

On January 31, 2023, Burry posted a single-word tweet: "Sell."Financial media everywhere blasted it out. The S&P wobbled briefly.

The result: on March 30, 2023, he posted another tweet: "I was wrong to say sell."Both tweets were later deleted.

6. China Tech — Going Long When Everyone Else Was Trashing It

The Q4 2022 13F was the first time Scion disclosed positions in Alibaba (BABA) and JD.com (JD). By the Q1 2023 filing, BABA was around $10.2M and JD around $11M — together about 20% of Scion's disclosed long book. The timing was exactly when Western media was most bearish on Chinese tech.

He held through 2024's wave of Chinese stimulus, when BABA and JD both ripped. The holding period stretched 18 months or more — a clean execution of "go long slowly, go short fast in fast out."

But he also stepped on landmines in the same period: the Q1 2023 13F showed that during the SVB banking crisis he bought First Republic (FRC) and PacWest (PACW). FRC eventually went to zero — his most public recent miss.

7. "He Trashed BTC to Almost Everyone — But Never Shorted It"

This is the most interesting part of Burry's career: he has a mountain of public commentary on crypto, but he's never actually pulled the trigger.

• He has never held BTC. He admitted on Substack that in 2013 a friend from Lightspeed introduced him to it, and he "slept on it and didn't buy."
• He has never actually shorted BTC. On October 15, 2021 he told CNBC directly: "I've not been shorting cryptocurrencies at all. And I'm not now."
• March 2021 tweet: "$BTC is a speculative bubble — more risk than opportunity. If you don't know how much leverage is behind it, you don't understand it yet."
• October 2021: two days before BTC ripped to $60K, he publicly asked "how do you short BTC?" and then deleted his X account.

On February 2, 2026, on his newly launched Cassandra Unchained Substack, he warned that a continued BTC drawdown could trigger a death spiral in MSTR, MARA, and RIOT — the stocks most exposed to BTC holdings. But he still hasn't disclosed any actual BTC-related short positions on his 13Fs. He only comments, he doesn't bet.

8. November 2025 — He Closed Scion and Launched a Substack

In November 2025, Burry formally withdrew Scion Asset Management's investment-adviser registration with the SEC. Later that same month he launched the Cassandra Unchained Substack. His stated reason: managing outside money was "gagging" him — he had to manage LP reactions, compliance, and media noise.

The last 13F before closing Scion (Q3 2025) disclosed his final major position: NVIDIA + Palantir puts, premium around $9.2M, notional around $900M. A bet against the AI theme. He even publicly traded barbs with Palantir CEO Alex Karp (Karp called him "batshit crazy").

9. Four Things Retail Can Learn

Distill 25 years of his public letters, 13Fs, and interviews and you see the same framework on four pillars:

1. Define the catalyst first, then size the position. "Real estate is overheated" is not a catalyst; "ARMs all reset in 2007" is. Apply this to crypto: "BTC is too expensive" is not a catalyst; "Mt.Gox repayments releasing en masse," "ETF net outflows for N consecutive days," and "MSTR forced-selling thresholds" are.
2. Use options instead of short selling. Burry has not been margin-called in 25 years — because he doesn't use leverage. The crypto equivalent: use Deribit dated puts, not perpetual-contract shorts, especially when your thesis horizon is longer than 30 days.
3. Be willing to look stupid for 6-24 months. The subprime trade burned premium from May 2005 and only broke even in late 2007. Those 18 months of "looking wrong" are the cost of the strategy, not a failure. Use TradingView alerts + DCA to scale in, not a single all-in.
4. Don't mistake a signal for execution. His own "Sell" tweet was reversed by him 8 weeks later. Other people's tweets are "research inputs," not "trade triggers." Use structured indicators + your own discipline, not someone else's emotion.

10. Three Things Worth Remembering

1. Frameworks repeat — hot tips don't. The Big Short was one trade, but he used the same toolkit for 25 years, with wins and losses (GameStop and Tesla were both mistimed). The point is that every trade uses a consistent decision process, not that every trade is right.
2. A strong opinion isn't a high-probability trade. He had ferocious views on BTC, but without a structured catalyst he never pulled the trigger. That's the polar opposite of the "I'm super bearish / super bullish" call-out culture on crypto Twitter.
3. Break a rule once and you can never go back. From 2005 through 2025 he never used leveraged shorts — always puts. That discipline is why, when the 2021 Tesla bet went wrong, he only lost premium and didn't blow up, so he could still be there for the next trade.

This article does not constitute investment advice. All figures come from SEC EDGAR 13F filings, Michael Lewis's The Big Short, public reporting from Bloomberg / Reuters / CNBC / FT, and Burry's own tweets (some deleted — retrievable via archive.org). Crypto trading is high risk; please assess your own risk tolerance.