The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
futurism.com
The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
Comments
130-
-
As an aside, you can tell how successful the rebranding of twitter as “x” has been, since even now more than 2 years after the rebranding news articles still have to add “formerly known as twitter” every time they mention it.
-
That dumbass throwing away the Twitter brand for a damn letter should be proof enough to anyone that he's a moron
-
It blew my mind when he announced it. Brand recognition is one of the most important things companies hope for, and Twitter was in it's own, very select brand recognition club at the top. Tweeting became part of everyday vernacular, in the same way that googling something became synonomous with searching online. It's a company's wet dream. No one says "gramming", "threading", "facebooking", etc. Maybe Snapchat has snapping, I'm out of the loop but even I've used tweeting/ed in every day conversations.
That recognition is the stupidest thing to just throw away, especially to replace it with something that can't replace it from a language perspective. Xing makes no sense in context.
-
-
But I also still say Facebook and Google instead of Meta and alphabet
-
Those are changes in parent company names though while the services Facebook and Google still exist. The rebrand of Twitter to X continuing to not stick for people is a much bigger failure on their part than Meta and Alphabet not entering the general zeitgeist.
-
-
Even Grok AI follows up with that reminder when it mentions X.
-
Some guy spending a billion dollars on pretty much nothing makes me deeply annoyed. Tax billionaires.
-
You must be annoyed A LOT these days. It seems that spending a lot of money on nothing is the latest trend for these people.
-
But spending it on their own terms. They would spend $100,000 on lawyers and lobbying to avoid paying $20,000 of new taxes.
-
-
Good thing Burry isn't a billionaire, he's a fund manager.
-
Capital gains are taxed. Profits from this are capital gains.
-
Burry similarly made a long-term $1 billion bet from 2005 onwards against the US mortgage market, anticipating its collapse. His fund rose a whopping 489 percent when the market did subsequently fall apart in 2008.
We may have to wait for another three years.
I looked into the article to find out how long a timeframe he is betting. Unfortunately, it does not say.
-
You'd think the timing should reflect the typical terms of loans and loan volumes - so that sounds plausible. When the default rate of those loans begins to creep up and become notable to investors, then people will get edgy.
I just hope it comes before our much loved and overpaid layers of incompetent management have destroyed all their manual production processes and replaced them with snake oil. If not a general economic downturn might start well before the ai bubble bursts.
-
How the hell did he do a long term bet against the market? Aren't shorts short-term and they're forced to pay after a set period of time? Even the inverse indexes will steadily make your money simply vanish.
-
I never got into options investing, but I believe you keep re-upping them. Every time you do so you pay a small price. So, the game is: 'can you stay liquid long enough for the bubble to pop'.
-
The longest term seems to be about 2 years.
-
You can keep a short position for a long time, as long as you can maintain margin, which gets bigger if the stock price continues increasing, and pay margin interest - there is no set date when the short has to he closed, it's indefinite. Sometimes the lender who loaned you the stock can ask for it back, and if you can't locate any more shares to borrow to replace the returned shares, you might be forced to buy the shares back and close the short, but this is not common, at least during normal market conditions.
-
-
A short is not only a bet on a direction but also a timing issue. You need to know roughly how long (time) to keep the option.
-
-
Its not a question of "if" but "when."
-
and whether he has enough liquidity to maintain his margin during absolutely insane market distortions by hedge funds, big banks, and the government.
-
And when it pops it will be a big bang in the entire global economy from what i heared and read.
-
I mean, the housing bubble burst and the government pulled 7 trillion out of its arse and handed it back to bankers, doubling the cost of current living from the knock-on inflation. Life went on, and not a single banker (except maybe some lackey in Iceland) was punished. The Rich got exceedingly wealthy after the crisis.
This time: the government will pull 50 trillion from its arse and hand it back to investors. Life will go on, no one will be punished, the cost of living will be a few times higher than what it is now, and the rich will get richer.
My interpretation: the big investors fully expect the bubble to burst and hope to win from the fallout/bailout. It's win-win for them.
-
-
-
The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won't burst? Keeping it going will require in ever-increasing amounts of money to paper over the gaping chasms that keep cropping up, and eventually the amount of money necessary to keep it going will cease to be feasible. Then, after taking gullible investor for all of they've got, the whole thing will fall over in the world's most well deserved and predictable market crash.
The subprime mortgage collapse was inevitable only in hindsight, you had to have a good understanding of the market to see it in advance. To see the level of corruption and false promises that have to be made in order to make the mortgage bubble possible. But everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open, I'm not talking about the "how many Rs are in strawberry" questions either, I can sort of see why that's not really a fair question. I'm talking about the fact that every single business that has ever tried to replace its employees with AI, has always failed, and failed almost immediately. Even Amazon couldn't make it work.
-
I think the idea is that, whilst shorting, you get squeezed. The question is not 'if' but 'when' and if it takes too long and you're $1B deep you can lose your shirt
-
I think, AI quality aside, it's mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA's market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society's ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.
And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn't think we'd get this far - the 2008 crisis didn't do it, COVID somehow didn't do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don't deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that's where the trick is going to be.
-
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
-
-
everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open
To me it is four things in particular:
- How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
- How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
- How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100%, as only less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
- The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion, depending on the current model.
In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.
But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.
After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
-
All this you listed is the reason why we are fucked if we keep depending more and more on "this" AI and don't get a revolution in the AI field to replace the current one with AGI. Because in ten years we risk losing a big chunk of expertise and if we don't have an AI that can really replace the current one with something that can actually replace experts then there will huge infrastructure problems across multiple industries.
-
Ugh... Minor rant.
My aunt is into tech like me. She dived head first into the AI in the middle of the hype instead of during IoT era when machine learning (the foundation of modern GPT models today) was part of a larger SDK for building smaller tasks. Now she won't stop pushing it onto my mom like a salesman by saying she should do this and that with ChatGPT or whatever, and it's so freakin' annoying.
Luckily, I've told my mom straight up to not buy into it.
-
Rich dumbasses found a place to waste all their money instead of the government taxing them and using that money for important things. they let them waste it on some climate change accelerator
-
The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won’t burst?
Nobody believes the AI investment/growth trajectory we have right now will continue for infinity. What nobody knows is: when the correction will occur.
- Do you pull your investments out now and sit on the sidelines waiting for the fallout while your principal loses value daily from inflation?
- What does the correction look like when it happens? Does all the value evaporate on day 1, the first week, a month? This is important to figure out for this strategy to know when to go back in.
This is the info/decisions you'd need as an average investor. What Burry is doing is the riskiest type of investments with shorting the market. If growth continue to occur he and his fund will have to pay for the growth to those whose shares he borrowed to short.
In summary, its not enough to know that a bubble exists, but to profit from it you have to figure out when it will burst and when the full burst is done.
-
-
Nvidia down ~8% this week, Palantir down ~10%
Maybe the needle really is shifting.
-
Maybe, but he's also been super wrong a bunch of times on his skitzo twitter account so grains of salt and all that. Not saying the guy isn't smart, clearly called one of the biggest systemic crisis of our times, but he struck gold once and struck out a bunch more often.
-
Because it's more likely that he got lucky once and his short position was strong enough that he could keep paying the premiums than it is that he is some super genius who knew something noone else knew
-
-
-
Good
-
since his bet on the housing market he effectively lost money. all the public things he made can also be safety investments in case his secret hedgefund stuff he doesn't have to disclose fails.
- this is what an ex-financebro told me yesterday
i LOVE LOVE LOVE the thought of the AI Bubble popping... but i don't think this MF is the guy to trust
-
Yeah, my heart sank a little when I saw burry shorted, it was about the same time I opened a small short position. I am so screwed..
-
I may be wrong but i thought this guy was not at all a respected investor and only made 1 good trade. So his opinion is kinda worthless.
-
TBF, an investor could make a thousand good investments and I'd still regard their opinion as worthless (here's lookin' at you, Buffet.) Being "good" at figuring out which stocks and companies you can exploit the most from the actually productive economy doesn't make you smart or in anyway good.
-
-
The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with.
Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars
Them he's betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we're okay with that shit.
All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell
-
Them he's betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we're okay with that shit.
Why should someone not be able to short some stock? The AI bubble will burst anyway.
Also, he doesn't have one billion dollars, he manages an investment fund that people collectively put a billion dollars (or more) there.
-
I'm not sure you understand what this article is or how our markets work.
The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with. Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars
He doesn't have a billion dollars. He's a hedge fund manager that manages (at least) a billion dollars collectively of other people's investment money. Its that money he's betting.
Them he’s betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we’re okay with that shit.
No, he's not. He's betting against only two companies: Nvidia and Palantir. He has a relatively small bet against Nvidia ($187.6 million), and HUGE bet against Palantir ($912 million). I'm not sure I'd bet against Nvidia yet, but Palantir is co-founded by Peter Theil, trump's deputy chief of staff which job has a large influence on White House policy. If you ever watched the TV show The West Wing, this would be the Josh Lyman character's job.
We already know trump's favor swings widely and if politics are going against trump (as recent news show) then its not unbelievable that Theil might get the boot or at least trump would punish Theil by killing lucrative government contracts to buy Palantir services.
All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell
The point of shorting a stock exists so that the market can express a view that they believe a stock will fail. This is an important "canary in the coal mine" for the rest of the market. The other option is a policy that you can't criticize a company with any meaning and investors continue to put money into failing/risky companies without this important indication of the risk.
Frankly I don't like your idea of jailing someone that says "The emperor has no clothes".
-
-
his fund, Scion Asset Management, bought $187.6 million in puts on Nvidia and $912 million in puts on Palantir (...) Palantir’s market cap is also up over 150 percent year-to-date. Its current valuation is upwards of 200 times its forward earnings, spreading fears that it may be grossly overvalued.
He knows which one is more likely to get really fucked in this bubble and it's not the shovel seller
Burry similarly made a long-term $1 billion bet from 2005 onwards against the US mortgage market, anticipating its collapse.
Can we assume his puts aren't for 2026, but at least 2028 or later?
As CNN points out, Burry’s track record isn’t perfect. For instance, he called in January 2023 to “sell” in a now infamous tweet
Something something irrational solvent something
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: "The two companies he’s shorting are the ones making all the money,"
One of the companies is making all the money and it's not Palantir.
-
Can we assume his puts aren’t for 2026, but at least 2028 or later?
I don't think you can buy puts that far out. The longest seems to be about 2 years, so I guess January 2027?
-
-
Burry also lost money since 2008 making shorts like Tesla. The Big Shart.
-
Looks like very mixed returns. Which is what you'd expect from a strategy of betting on areas that are significantly overvalued.
-
-
My plan is to stay invested until dividends hit in December, and then I'm going to evaluate moving my investments into a money market or bonds. Amazon's numbers show that consumers are still buying, and my assumption is that consumer spending will hold off the pop for now.
I 100% expect a massive crash, and when it's just seven companies propping up an entire economy, the pop is going to be very bad. I'd rather lose a little value in the short term than have my portfolio drop to a calamitous degree and have to wait 5-10 years for it to recover.
*not a FA, just my personal plan
-
I stopped putting money into us equities and started to put them in purely international index funds. I havent sold anything though.
-
You think the US economy going totally tits up won't take the rest of the world with it to some degree?
-
Yeah, this economy has given me the heebie-jeebies for the last quarter now.
Unless you're a billionaire or on a signal chat in Washington, I don't know how you can feel good about what's happening.
-
-
Mid-Cap index funds should be fairly insulated from the damage as well, given they would exclude companies as large as nVidia.
Either way, biggest thing people is when the bubble pops, that is the time to buy in more, not the time to sell. The buy high-sell low strategy is easy to fall into emotionally.
-
that is the time to buy in more, not the time to sell.
1000000%
That's the other side of my strategy, having my portfolio in cash means I can reinvest at the new fire sale prices.
I was able to pay off my student loans by buying oil stock at a 90% discount in March 2020 and then waiting a few years for the rebound. You don't even need to be rich to do it, just patient.
-
-
I'm waiting for my sweet 200 in tax returns and rolling it into scratch tickets.
-
May the odds be ever in your favor.
-
-
I wish I could convince SO to do this with our funds but they will just say im a doomsdayer
-
The good news is. Even if you don't change your strategy, you can just chill on index funds. When the bubble pops, they will go down, just keep buying more. In the long term, you will still make money. US index funds earn ~8% per year on average when invested for long periods of time.
-
Oof, yeah. Having to make group decisions with money is tough.
Partly why I love being single and childless.
-
-
-
Market is so fake and manipulated that I no longer have any interest in investing in it. Like always for decades now it is a transfer to the wealthy system.
-
I think it's a bubble but I'm also suspicious we're near peak investment and think it could sustain for a while yet. I wonder what sort of range he's projecting for the peak and timeframe
-
has bet over $1 billion that the share prices of AI chipmaker Nvidia and software company Palantir will fall
not a very tough bet to make tbh.
very misleading title and literally no commenters could even read the first paragraph here lol. Man the AI hate is truly reaching the looms now
-
are... you making that bet?
-
Nope can't be bothered with any gambling - life's too nice for crap like this.
-
-
-
This is a long term investment, predicting that the bubble will burst _at some point _. It doesn't signify that he believes the collapse to be imminent. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent!
-
I don't like or trust the stock market and all of the back door manipulations that can, and have, been done, but this guy is not wrong.
-
Predicting the random market movements is ... almost impossible, even for this "big short guy" imho.
-
Can’t wait.
-
-
Lol well, wonder where he gets his information. Seems sus. I am familiar with who he is. Just curious what piece of information was the "tipping" point. People don't put money down like that unless they have insider knowledge, IMO.
-
Yeah they do though. His bet before the 2008 crash was similar. It's where the market is pointing. Publicly available data suggests there's a big ass bubble. The timing is essentially a bet. Last time it almost wiped him out because he was a bit early. We'll see how it goes this time.
-
I did a search on the internet for 'big ass bubble', and to my surprise the results had nothing to do with a.i.
-
-
Well he found out about the sub-prime mortgage fiasco by looking at the public filings that nobody bothers reading. All of the companies involved are public companies that have to file accounts. He'll be tracing what's going on and painting himself a picture.
-
If I had to make a guess, I say it probably will. The convenience of AI is probably here to stay, but the craze of replacing everything with AI will go out the door.
AI will become exactly what it should have been in the first place: an assistant. Not your friend, not your doctor, not your therapist, not a replacement for artists/authors/programmers, and not inside every piece of tech post 2025. It has a place. That place is over-embellished right now, not to mention unsustainable.
It will definitely burst, and might take out some fairly large companies with it. Potentially even one or two tech companies that have been around for decades depending on how large it gets before that burst. One or two companies will end up with the IP all of them are "building" and it will fizzle into the background of daily use just like the previous assistants like Alexa, Cortana, etc. have.
Please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft.
Agreed. Probably where it should have stayed in the first place. Not that its not interesting, just that the scope of AI has widened beyond what it should have.
the real danger is if it will cause another great depression when it pops...
Depends on when the bust happens. If its in the current admin? All those tech companies are getting bailed out.
I am having trouble seeing how OpenAI survives without investment cash. What exactly is their moat? I know they are hoping to power the AI behind everyone else’s tech but that is more and more untenable as the others develop AI models of their own.
Just a reminder that the term "AI" stands for a category of systems that contains a lot more than just LLMs.
Sir, this is the stock market.
People order with their feelings, not facts.
True, true. In this context I mean the LLM craze. The GPU era of AI.
Main reason it can flourish as assistant in the first place is that Google search engine became shit
It's not that Google's algorithms got bad, but the entire Internet turned to shit and they can't compensate for it.
For anytime not time-sensitive, try adding "before:2023" to your search. I'm being the quality of your results will skyrocket.
Dotcom groundhog day for the tech sector.
"convenience"? You mean CEOs being able to lay off workers with some magical technology that does nothing? Yeah, that's surely convenient for the 0.1% of people in the world that doesn't affect. Love that "convenience" for them.
Did it cup your balls during the last BJ or something? Fucking hell, what is it with randos on the web scaping for AI at every instance...