AI doomers really are punching the air these days.
They will be right eventually and inevitably. Until then, it's funny watching them build a personal "brand" just to say "I told you so" when the market drops in X years.
He didn't say AI is doomed or a fluke, he said that these two AI companies aren't worth 1T in capitalization.
The same way semiconductor, internet or railroad companies were not great investments regardless of how important the technology was going to be. It's still a financial investment and it's only going to pay off if bought at the right price, not at crazy multiples.
I will also add: if all your moat is your latest model, you're as good as your latest model and can be easily dethroned.
Strong moats are monopoly-like concessions (Verisign), exclusive technological edge (ASML), brands (Coca Cola), etc.
Anthropic is the one company where that makes no sense. If revenue really is about 50 billion annually and growing than that means that a 20x 1 year of revenue valuation is modest compared to the shenanigans that have been going in the market. It's almost classically textbook conservative in comparison. The moat with these corporate enterprise contracts is literally your conversation history and companies aren't likely to jump ship when everyone likes the tools so long as costs stay nominal. AI at most orgs isn't even the biggest line item.
All competitors need are their latest model to be either better or similar but much cheaper. And Anthropic has no less than 2 big competitors in the space in US alone providing similar quality models.
There's no moat in LLMs when you're as good as your latest model.
Companies out there aren't in the business of throwing money down the drain.
Take DS4, you can use Deepseek APIs directly with Claude Code, and you're unlikely to notice a difference for the overwhelming majority of your use cases. But your bills run in few $ per day. I'm talking 2 magnitudes less.
You forget the institutional inertia of how these things get negotiated from year to year. If something is working for people they tend to wanna keep it. The existing curation of how everything works is cheaper than rolling your own. Sure you can get something running yourself but integrations for a lot of people are worth some of this cost. Also for AI heavy customers (multimedia, video, etc) the sky is the limit and there's not enough processing for it right now.
We know nothing about Anthropic, they make a few money go round deals, announce a bit of revenue, extrapolate it into the whole year and people parrot that they may be making $50bn. Most likely the cost to remain competitive eats at whatever revenue they could hope to make. I expect them to fudge the numbers the last quarter before their IPO, dump on passive investors, and then go back to being officially unprofitable.
What does revenue have to do with it? Mercedes has a revenue of $130 billion, profit of $5 billion and a market cap of $56 billion.
According to your logic, it should have a market cap of $2.6 trillion.
Conservative is to look at P/E, which is 10 for Mercedes.
Anthropic isn't even a growth stock, since it has already been force fed to everyone with one of the largest marketing and coercion campaigns in history.
I've had economics professors tell me that a "normal" business valuation is 10 years of profit so your example is in line with my thinking there. I'm just as curious to see the final numbers as you but if they are even approaching them it's not very out there to consider a high valuation. I don't wish to speculate on what the numbers actually are. I want to see them too.
> Strong moats are monopoly-like concessions (Verisign), exclusive technological edge (ASML), brands (Coca Cola), etc.
Agreed with the exception of Verisign. Many a "security" company went bust like DigiNotar after mishaps or hacks. Being a globally trusted root CA or DNS operator is a strong moat - but also an incredibly brittle one.
And brands... brands aren't as safe as we thought either, as "store brands"/"private labels" are taking up more and more market share [1].
Being an AI enthusiast doesn't mean you have to say "yes my lord" to every coked-up delusions dario, musk and altman decide to regurgitate today. This feels more and more like football team shenanigans, or even a cult.
Neither Anthropic, Open AI nor SpaceX in its current form is a good candidate for an IPO at valuations that all but guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars in "passive capital" aka pension funds and ETFs will have to buy in.
SpaceX might have been a candidate on its own core business (aka: launching spacecraft and Starlink), but ever since the weird side deals with all of the other companies in the Muskverse (Twitter, xAI, Tesla) it is far too contaminated.
Sooner or later the AI bubble will burst - and assuming that the pension funds and ETFs buy in as projected, they stand to lose a lot of money that will make Covid's first lockdown + dotcom + 2007 Lehman combined look pale.
Elon must be looking to merge the new amalgamation of SPCX into TSLA and join all his sinking ships in one. Starlink itself won't be able to save that, but make it too big and the government might. That is the way to get to the ridiculous valuations needed for Elon's pay package.
He's been wrong a few times, but has been right far more than ONCE and appears to be profitably making decisions. For example:
Short dot.com stocks (55% return), short subprime mortgages (Massive return), long Gamestop 2019, short ARKK 2021, The shorts on Palantir and NVDA are probably still running (PLTR 25% in profit, NVDA 20% loss).
The Gamestop 2019 play was a fundamental analysis on supply and demand of the shares of the stock vs financial performance. TSLA seems to be similar. There is just a lot of demand for the the stock.
Its frustrating; you grind out a living making consistent solid double digit returns for investors and all anyone talks about is a guy who made 5bn for their investors 20 years ago and has lost 25bn for them since.
It’s very risky to make these kind of claims. If the denominator (USD) gets obliterated they might very well be worth $1T. It’s all about liquidity and central banks have a whole bag of tricks at their disposal. They never want to see deflation shocks again and they prefer asset inflation.
The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore. So, in some sense, it is immaterial that the rosy scenarios where AI is responsible for >$30 trillion in the next decade are unlikely. If you bet against the hype and it goes on for a few more months/years you lose as much or more than if you went along for the ride.
Burry is well aware of this, he has written about how passive investing is contributing to this problem.
> The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore.
It has been broken since ~2008 (ZIRPs, etc.) and has really gone off the rails since BTC and memestocks have taken off. Now everything's a memestock. It's all vibes-based.
People really think we have found a way to negate the laws of physics. As of there can exist a system without entropy.
Humans are prisoners of the present moment, but just think what a market is. What does it really mean as it accumulates disorder for decade plus.
Can the market just continue to deviate from a markets actual purpose forever? Hell, can anything in this universe exist in a particular state forever.
If it can’t, then it means at some point things have to go in the other direction. Use your imagination what that means for the largest most complex (man made) system in the history of this planet.
The fact that so many people think the Fed will step in and magically keep the number up is why I'm pretty certain this is going to turn out like the late-20s.
The cynical nihilists have capitulated to the stock market always going up, that has to be flashing a very bearish warning sign.
I don't think there is a single thing that explain the absolute joke that is the current market. Algorithmic trading, high-frequency trading, deregulation, passive investment, “finance” influencer pump and dumping ... But in general, I do believe it has the same issues that you can say about anything these days. It's not like those things didn't exist into a form or another in the past, but it's just so, so much faster these days.
To make a parallel, it's not like disinformation didn't exist in the past, but nowadays with social media, llms and image gen tools and a few armies of bots, you can spread whatever bullshit you want at lightning speed.
It's a confluence of factors, but the really big ones are, IMO, what I mentioned:
- ZIRP and similar policies essentially forced everybody to get into the stock market if they wanted to tread water.
- Then people saw with BTC (and similar, e.g. ETH,) that these so-called "market investments" don't need to be rooted in any kind of fundamental. They can be weightless tokens. This, in short order, lead to silly things like memestocks and NFTs -- but they also twisted the hell out of the markets. The valuation of TSLA has long been an example of this.
Then there's inflation, which has inflated stock market prices as much as it has inflated anything else. And there are toothless regulators who would deserve our sympathy if they weren't so lackadaisical. There are also llms, social media, etc. -- but those feed on the above.
Simple. Most "passive investors" are ETFs and pension funds that sometimes by law, sometimes by statute/sales prospect are limited to being low-risk, i.e. the monthly contributions go towards "safe" asset classes, and in addition retail customers prefer low-fee (and thus low-management) funds.
That in turn means that a lot of the invested money goes towards ultra-safe stuff like government bonds, which is about the only thing keeping the US government afloat (if there is always a healthy amount of buyers, you can go into debt no matter if it is sustainable), and what remains of the hundreds of billions of dollars that flow into these funds each month (and [1] is just pension funds, not 401k and other forms of privately-held retirement assets) and is not earmarked for such safe asset classes spills onto the ordinary stock market, i.e. S&P 500, NASDAQ et al.
And here comes the trap with low-fee investment funds... when the ETF or pension fund's policy is "we'll track NASDAQ 100" and SpaceX enters NASDAQ 100, they have no choice than to shift billions of dollars worth of assets into SpaceX at whatever is the market price at that point. No matter if the fund managers think that the valuation is excessive, if SpaceX has a long term viable business strategy, nothing can prevent this.
To make it worse: once in NASDAQ 100, you as a company have no incentive to behave. You cannot be punished by free-market means (aka going under), simply because your inclusion in the NASDAQ 100 means that any significant loss in value would wipe out way too much value in pension funds.
The US' idea to completely tie pensions to the stock market will fry the US economy alive. We've already seen this during and past Covid... first, lockdowns got relaxed because it fried the stock markets too heavily, thus giving us four massive waves until vaccine distribution caught up, and then remote work that was allowed in many countries by law got slowly axed because REITs (real estate investment trusts) got screwed by companies quitting expensive rental contracts for office space. But that pales in comparison to what we'll see when the AI bubble pops.
Isn't a counter argument that there are index funds for just about everything? Ie, I'm sure there will be an index for "Everything in S&P Except SpaceX" for those who think SpaceX doesn't belong there. There are even "anti-index index funds" that are defined by being the opposite of another ETF.
Passive investing funnels money into the market without accounting for business fundamentals. It simply allocates funding by looking at sector and market cap. It's the definition of dumb money.
As long as companies can make it into the index, passive investors will funnel money into buying stock of these companies, no matter how badly these companies are run.
Doesn't that passive process reverse at some point?
The trillions that mechanically and automatically flowed into index funds in pensions and 401k accounts must mechanically and automatically flow right back out after retirement, right?
Especially when younger generations are too poor to save for retirement and most companies don't offer pensions to younger workers any more, where will the inflows come from to offset the outflows?
As long as the money supply keeps increasing, excess money has few places to go (bank deposits, stocks, real estate, and physical goods). Most of it will go into the stock market, since it's quite liquid with and has good investment returns.
Also, a significant part of the stock market is driven by foreign investment. The US has few capital controls and is an easy market for foreigners to invest in. Around 1/3rd of US stocks are owned by foreigners.
Even if the older generation sells during retirement, foreign investment will be more than enough to replace it.
> If you bet against the hype and it goes on for a few more months/years you lose as much or more than if you went along for the ride.
> Burry is well aware of this ...
Well, no he isn't well aware of this, apparently. He's been right in 2008 but he has been spectacularly wrong for the last 5 to 10 years, like shorting Tesla or Nvidia at the worst possible moments - and eventually closing his hedge fund...
Sure, no one can predict the future. But even then, Tesla's fundamentals are shaky and it is held by Musk's ability to sell his story and brand, only some fundamentals hold- albeit the same 'fans' buying its cars might be invested in its stock. Same thing might be happening with Nvidia- hyperscalers heavily investing in infrastructure and pushing AI adoption to justify ROI.
He was wrong about the timing of the bubble popping and might well still be too early, as passive investing might allow for the market to keep inflating for many years to come. Mike Green explaining it better, about how mathematically, there is an inflexion point where if x% of investment is passive, it could make the whole system unstable (I don't remember the specific number) and crash, but until then, it will keep rising.
He didn't realized that speculating stocks allowed by Fed and both parties. The vast majority money needed to prop up American economy right now (or in the last 10 years) have nothing to do with econ 101. It is purely money printing at its finest making Japanese banana money and Germans look amateurish. Fed now basically print money to bank and directed bank to buy stocks and loans as they like to certain orgs and individuals. Any short selling or whistleblowers suicided.
> shorting Tesla or Nvidia at the worst possible moments - and eventually closing his hedge fund...
He just didn't take to heart that the market can stay irrational for longer then he could stay solvent.
Both Tesla and Nvidia valuations are irrational from a market perspective. Doesn't mean they'll crash within the next months or even years, but it wouldn't be surprising if they did
The US is adding so much money to the economy every year and all that money has to go somewhere. I used to think this would come crashing down but at this point no one cares about debt and by the time we do it will be too late.
>>The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore.
Nah, it might appear so, but the moment of reckoning always arrives, always. Like eventually, it arrives.
Its a different argument, that most people themselves are not long-term investors, in that case of course, such a thing doesn't even apply to you.
I think Fidelity did some research that the most profitable accounts belonged to dead people. The proven formula is to pick the best stocks out there, pyramid upwards and be patient.
I think you could argue Anthropic could be worth $1T. With AI becoming an essential work utility, every global knowledge worker would want a claude subscription. There are 650M to 1B of such office workers. 300M workers × $50/month × 12 = $180B/year. The genie is not going back into the bottle, I have seen what claude code can do when properly connected to tools.
But Micheals arguments are valid. There could be competition, or even local models, thus indeed becoming 'commoditized'.
thing is, we have both local models and local hardware and a true evaluation would do a calculation before openai inflated thw market, before nvidia made circular deals and the other distortions.
i think youd find the ROI is nowhere near the API rates are the "price support" is entirely a figment of billionaires and their parasites trying to corner the market by horde logistics
What probability do you assign to that, especially since CC harness code leaked?
Because I used frontier models this weekend (I had 78% of my assigned tokens for this month left, I wanted to burn them before June 1st, ended up with 24% left), and tbh, I don't see much of the improvement compared to the models I use day-to-day. I'd rather pay less for a slightly worse model. Stacktrace analysis (or any bug analysis really) is where LLMs have the most success rate imho, and free models are good enough since last year. As for coding/architecture tasks, frontier models seems to hallucinate less, but I wonder if it's the guardrails or the he model themselves.
AI is far from becoming an essential work utility, Anthropic will not be used by approximately 100% of the office workers in the developed world, and a price to sales ratio of over 5 for a company that is struggling to become profitable due to high operating expenses seems exceptionally high.
The problem with all these companies is that they are priced as if their training and inference costs are going to come way down, but somehow only for them specifically.
Well... $1 a day is not that far from that hypothetical $50 a month though.
Especially if it gives you access to significantly more powerful models (which it does).
EDIT: i still find absurd thinking that all those subscription would go to a single company, let me be clear. But that $50 price doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
> Especially if it gives you access to significantly more powerful models (which it does).
Anthropic and OpenAI are losing lots of money with their subscriptions. They are giving away access to those powerful models for cheap. The Deepseek price is the API price, which is the only sustainable approach here
The real question is how we are defining "worth." Much of the market has decoupled from traditional fundamental data, with Tesla's P/E of 380 illustrating this perfectly, but the Tesla stock price refuses to collapse.
We all know the market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent if you bet against it. If you watched "The Long Short" (excellent movie btw.) you know how close Michael Burry came to capitulation before his subprime bet paid off. He seems to have a tendency to be too early with his predictions, even with his genius GameStop investment. So while he may be right again fundamentally, his timing may be completely off and those companies could be "worth" significantly more than a trillion dollars, at least temporarily, in stock valuations.
My personal prediction is this: The hype will go on longer than people think, just like with the New Economy. There is this quote from market analyst Larry Wachtel in 1999 who said: "Everybody's happy, everybody's making money - something's wrong here"[1]. Ironically, even Wachtel eventually succumbed to FOMO, capitulated, went in late, and lost a lot of money[2]. I am trying to not make his mistake, but it will be tempting to do so, I am sure about that.
Exactly. Anthropic has been losing three-comma money until recently. In Q2 2026 it earned a profit for the first time, about $500 million. If we imagine they will earn $2 billion in 2026, that’s a 0.2% return on the $1 trillion investment.
To believe the valuation, Anthropic earnings need to grow 100x. For a more likely outcome, I can recommend a bridge in Brooklyn.
The largest so far. We have always been in a boom/ bust cycle. The difference is that they are coming faster and faster.
I need to figure out the next one.
The famous quote, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," is widely attributed to the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946
The internet absolutely went bust. That’s what the dotcom crash was.
Same with a lot of physical infrastructure. The UK has a robust railroad network today, but it was built during a bubble that was so insane people would take loans from banks to invest in railroad stocks.
How does it matter to you? If you had invested in Internet broadly, you would have been WAY better off in the long term. Meaning: your strategy had been to keep investments tied to Internet first companies, you would have done better than pretty much any other person.
Things go up and down but broadly internet went up.
Since you couldn't "put money in the internet", you had to choose some actual companies. Your results varied by which company you chose, and when you invested. (This is always the case, obviously) Sun Microsystems? Let's say you bought the dip at the end of May 2000, at $150. It's ending price when it was bought by Oracle in 2010 was $9.50. [1] Suppose you bought Cisco at the same time for $37.30. You would have waited 18 years, until Aug 2018 for it to reach the same height. Now it's at $127, which over 26 years is an annualized return of 5%. It would have only taken 14 years to break even with Microsoft.
Now, if you had put your money in those stocks 12 months later, you would do okay (except for Sun). So, no, those pensions did not do the right thing by buying at the peak of a bubble. At least, not for people like me who don't like 15 years of negative returns.
On average, all the time. By any reasonable measure, more wealth has been created the longer the time horizon. Looking at the S&P500 over time gives an indication.
The new thing lately is ETFs that are "Whole-Market minus Microsoft" or "Whole-Market Minus Magnificent Seven". You can achieve similar ends by combining a whole market fund with direct short positions if you're an institutional investor, but it gets a little needy of your attention and your calculator and your fees to maintain those positions as a low-cap retail investor (just buy a put a day or something?).
I am explicitly avoiding these indices until this exploit is fixed. The lack of diversity in SPY and the like is already bad enough without these pump and dump schemes being added to the mix.
Buy alternative ETFs with similar performance and low fees. VIG is one example.
But he then writes: "I want to be really clear that this is the schematic maximally cynical approach, is not what SpaceX is doing, and is not actually possible."
They want the index to be representative of the top stocks listed on the Nasdaq, even if they are brand new. The Nasdaq 100 in particular is a marketing tool for the stock exchange, it's not a particularly principled index.
Quote from Cameron Lilja, Nasdaq's global head of index solutions:
"It is not necessarily representative to have a company that's big and could have a sizable representation in the index to keep them out for that long," Lilja said in an interview. "We're seeing share and corporate structures change - and companies that are staying private considerably longer are thus growing to be truly mega-cap companies before they even come to the public markets."
There's been fewer IPOs recently so Nasdaq and competitors are all racing to woo the few big ones to list with them.
Tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for listing. But they make money from the trading and associated services they facilitate, hence the desire to have the largest most liquid stocks.
Literally adjusting my pension funds and ETA's away from this ... I don't even care if I lose out. I want stable growth. Not a nation obsessed with memestocks.
And the counterpoint is that META, GOOG, AMZN, MSFT are all betting their companies that AI is the next move. Just yesterday, GOOG lent another $80 billion to be invested in their AI hardware, and they're also investing their own stock in AI hardware, for a cumulative investment of already over $1 trillion. Clearly the tech sector thinks this is worth it.
And of course the people deciding in FANG companies actually have numbers, Michael Burry has the same numbers you have. So these investments are "worth it" according to people with inside information. What Burry is doing, in one perspective, is calling out the leadership of FANG companies. Now that's the job of a short-seller of course. But that's the bet being made.
Doesn't matter, it will go into the nasdaq/s&p at $1t, passive funds will have to buy it at that price, meaning a wealth transfer from 401ks to people with pre-ipo stock
The only reason AI is worth $1T is if you believe it will continue to get better and displace all those jobs, not just in claude replacing knowlege workers, but in the outcome of that work being so transformational that physical work is also replaced.
If it does, then the entire economy is completely turned over and it doesn't really matter as nobody will have a job, and thus the entire concept of the S&P and the western economy as a whole falls to bits.
Or maybe it's very rational because their 2021 (IPO year) revenue ($7,839m) was higher than their 2025 revenue ($7,181).
Granted, their profitability is better but in 2021 they were (rationally) valued based on Great Expectations which didn't pan out.
Now they're (rationally) valued on Much Less Great Expectations.
So I think it has nothing to do with skills of early investors (not the boogeymen, irrelevant private equity) and everything to do with Coinbase being a fast growth company at the time of IPO and being negative growth company after IPO.
IPOs are one-shot, sealed-bid auctions, and the winner’s curse applies. There are separate equilibria where the company maximizes its cash gains or its fully diluted market cap. It can pick which to target.
“Leaving nothing on the table” would mean selling few enough shares at the IPO that you have to overpay to get shares at the IPO. Previous valuations are known, as is that implied by each choice of IPO price when looking at the book. So the skill is just in the company not needing all that much money and being great at generating hype.
This is a very interesting comment. Companies like OpenAI or ChatGPT sell hardware hidden in tokens, and the token is different for each company depending on the tokenizer. The concern is this: when you have an Opus 4.7, Sonnet, or GPT 5X with an Nvidia H100 or H200 GPU, what will happen to this cost when, if not Nvidia, another Chinese company enters the market and starts running these models? The point here is that as long as Nvidia is the provider, and limits access to the machines and the number of data centers is also limited, these companies can be worth whatever they want. But the moment this starts to expand, the value will surely decline, because what you're selling isn't the model itself, which is ultimately just a 1 TB file that you have replicated across machines. What you're selling is access to a software program on a specialized machine. As long as you control the resource, which in this case is that machine, you'll have value. The moment other machine manufacturers enter the market, your value will decrease.
If you check openrouter there are a tons of providers selling API access to open source LLMs at a fraction of the cost compared to SOTA models (codex/claude). What model you're serving and what kind of platform you serve is a big factor.
I'm no expert but I think eventually we'll have even more specialized ASIC like machines with models burned into them and a that will absorb a chunk of the market, similar to what happened to crypto mining but to a lesser degree since the work isn't as static.
beernet | 7 hours ago
They will be right eventually and inevitably. Until then, it's funny watching them build a personal "brand" just to say "I told you so" when the market drops in X years.
epolanski | 6 hours ago
The same way semiconductor, internet or railroad companies were not great investments regardless of how important the technology was going to be. It's still a financial investment and it's only going to pay off if bought at the right price, not at crazy multiples.
I will also add: if all your moat is your latest model, you're as good as your latest model and can be easily dethroned.
Strong moats are monopoly-like concessions (Verisign), exclusive technological edge (ASML), brands (Coca Cola), etc.
alexpotato | 6 hours ago
Paul Graham doesn't think so
https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
hparadiz | 6 hours ago
epolanski | 6 hours ago
There's no moat in LLMs when you're as good as your latest model.
Companies out there aren't in the business of throwing money down the drain.
Take DS4, you can use Deepseek APIs directly with Claude Code, and you're unlikely to notice a difference for the overwhelming majority of your use cases. But your bills run in few $ per day. I'm talking 2 magnitudes less.
hparadiz | 6 hours ago
epolanski | 5 hours ago
potatototoo99 | 6 hours ago
mapt | 5 hours ago
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...
tlakshgf | 5 hours ago
According to your logic, it should have a market cap of $2.6 trillion.
Conservative is to look at P/E, which is 10 for Mercedes.
Anthropic isn't even a growth stock, since it has already been force fed to everyone with one of the largest marketing and coercion campaigns in history.
hparadiz | 5 hours ago
surgical_fire | 5 hours ago
It also has no path to become profitable.
surgical_fire | 5 hours ago
Might I interest you in some bridges sir?
mschuster91 | 6 hours ago
Agreed with the exception of Verisign. Many a "security" company went bust like DigiNotar after mishaps or hacks. Being a globally trusted root CA or DNS operator is a strong moat - but also an incredibly brittle one.
And brands... brands aren't as safe as we thought either, as "store brands"/"private labels" are taking up more and more market share [1].
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/shoppers-are-tradi...
monooso | 6 hours ago
toasty228 | 4 hours ago
dansmith1919 | 6 hours ago
mschuster91 | 6 hours ago
Neither Anthropic, Open AI nor SpaceX in its current form is a good candidate for an IPO at valuations that all but guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars in "passive capital" aka pension funds and ETFs will have to buy in.
SpaceX might have been a candidate on its own core business (aka: launching spacecraft and Starlink), but ever since the weird side deals with all of the other companies in the Muskverse (Twitter, xAI, Tesla) it is far too contaminated.
Sooner or later the AI bubble will burst - and assuming that the pension funds and ETFs buy in as projected, they stand to lose a lot of money that will make Covid's first lockdown + dotcom + 2007 Lehman combined look pale.
potatototoo99 | 6 hours ago
cmsj | 6 hours ago
helsinkiandrew | 6 hours ago
Short dot.com stocks (55% return), short subprime mortgages (Massive return), long Gamestop 2019, short ARKK 2021, The shorts on Palantir and NVDA are probably still running (PLTR 25% in profit, NVDA 20% loss).
turtlesdown11 | 5 hours ago
So he really relies on zero fundamental analysis these days
dgellow | 4 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze#:~:text...
chung8123 | 4 hours ago
mellosouls | 6 hours ago
IAmBroom | 2 hours ago
blitzar | 6 hours ago
lifty | 6 hours ago
monooso | 6 hours ago
pu_pe | 6 hours ago
Burry is well aware of this, he has written about how passive investing is contributing to this problem.
A_D_E_P_T | 6 hours ago
It has been broken since ~2008 (ZIRPs, etc.) and has really gone off the rails since BTC and memestocks have taken off. Now everything's a memestock. It's all vibes-based.
fireflash38 | 5 hours ago
There are no fundamentals.
There is very low signal to the noise.
bumby | 5 hours ago
Isn’t this the exact same sentiment from the late 1920s when people were making “insane, life changing” money by buying equities on margin?
Eddy_Viscosity2 | 5 hours ago
It may well though, because now we have an automatic buy from the government to 'fix' the market if it 'breaks'. The line goes up.
idiotsecant | 5 hours ago
timacles | 2 hours ago
Humans are prisoners of the present moment, but just think what a market is. What does it really mean as it accumulates disorder for decade plus.
Can the market just continue to deviate from a markets actual purpose forever? Hell, can anything in this universe exist in a particular state forever.
If it can’t, then it means at some point things have to go in the other direction. Use your imagination what that means for the largest most complex (man made) system in the history of this planet.
bumby | 2 hours ago
dualvariable | 16 minutes ago
The cynical nihilists have capitulated to the stock market always going up, that has to be flashing a very bearish warning sign.
surgical_fire | 5 hours ago
I wouldn't advocate for betting against any of this. But I took my money out of the stock market a few months ago.
Shorting is too risky and depends a lot on timing. Staying clear of this mess is a safer bet.
maeln | 4 hours ago
To make a parallel, it's not like disinformation didn't exist in the past, but nowadays with social media, llms and image gen tools and a few armies of bots, you can spread whatever bullshit you want at lightning speed.
A_D_E_P_T | 4 hours ago
- ZIRP and similar policies essentially forced everybody to get into the stock market if they wanted to tread water.
- Then people saw with BTC (and similar, e.g. ETH,) that these so-called "market investments" don't need to be rooted in any kind of fundamental. They can be weightless tokens. This, in short order, lead to silly things like memestocks and NFTs -- but they also twisted the hell out of the markets. The valuation of TSLA has long been an example of this.
Then there's inflation, which has inflated stock market prices as much as it has inflated anything else. And there are toothless regulators who would deserve our sympathy if they weren't so lackadaisical. There are also llms, social media, etc. -- but those feed on the above.
dgllghr | 3 hours ago
bdcravens | 3 hours ago
martinclayton | 6 hours ago
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
A long-term principle that I think does still apply.
throwfaraway4 | 5 hours ago
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine”
- benjamin graham
rchaud | an hour ago
- creative accounting (Enron, Worldcom)
- zero-interest rate policy
- SPAC IPOs
- exotic securitization (credit default swaps)
...that made valuation more opaque over time. The age of value investing is long gone.
bumby | 5 hours ago
ghtbircshotbe | 5 hours ago
deepserket | 5 hours ago
mschuster91 | 4 hours ago
That in turn means that a lot of the invested money goes towards ultra-safe stuff like government bonds, which is about the only thing keeping the US government afloat (if there is always a healthy amount of buyers, you can go into debt no matter if it is sustainable), and what remains of the hundreds of billions of dollars that flow into these funds each month (and [1] is just pension funds, not 401k and other forms of privately-held retirement assets) and is not earmarked for such safe asset classes spills onto the ordinary stock market, i.e. S&P 500, NASDAQ et al.
And here comes the trap with low-fee investment funds... when the ETF or pension fund's policy is "we'll track NASDAQ 100" and SpaceX enters NASDAQ 100, they have no choice than to shift billions of dollars worth of assets into SpaceX at whatever is the market price at that point. No matter if the fund managers think that the valuation is excessive, if SpaceX has a long term viable business strategy, nothing can prevent this.
To make it worse: once in NASDAQ 100, you as a company have no incentive to behave. You cannot be punished by free-market means (aka going under), simply because your inclusion in the NASDAQ 100 means that any significant loss in value would wipe out way too much value in pension funds.
The US' idea to completely tie pensions to the stock market will fry the US economy alive. We've already seen this during and past Covid... first, lockdowns got relaxed because it fried the stock markets too heavily, thus giving us four massive waves until vaccine distribution caught up, and then remote work that was allowed in many countries by law got slowly axed because REITs (real estate investment trusts) got screwed by companies quitting expensive rental contracts for office space. But that pales in comparison to what we'll see when the AI bubble pops.
[1] Q1 20: 23T, Q1 21: 26T => about 3T/y, 250B/mo, per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL594090005Q
bumby | 2 hours ago
mschuster91 | 33 minutes ago
tristanj | 4 hours ago
As long as companies can make it into the index, passive investors will funnel money into buying stock of these companies, no matter how badly these companies are run.
panarky | 3 hours ago
The trillions that mechanically and automatically flowed into index funds in pensions and 401k accounts must mechanically and automatically flow right back out after retirement, right?
Especially when younger generations are too poor to save for retirement and most companies don't offer pensions to younger workers any more, where will the inflows come from to offset the outflows?
tristanj | an hour ago
Also, a significant part of the stock market is driven by foreign investment. The US has few capital controls and is an easy market for foreigners to invest in. Around 1/3rd of US stocks are owned by foreigners.
Even if the older generation sells during retirement, foreign investment will be more than enough to replace it.
WinstonSmith84 | 5 hours ago
> Burry is well aware of this ...
Well, no he isn't well aware of this, apparently. He's been right in 2008 but he has been spectacularly wrong for the last 5 to 10 years, like shorting Tesla or Nvidia at the worst possible moments - and eventually closing his hedge fund...
[OP] mgh2 | 4 hours ago
heisgone | 4 hours ago
panarky | 3 hours ago
Haven880 | 3 hours ago
IAmBroom | 3 hours ago
ffsm8 | 42 minutes ago
He just didn't take to heart that the market can stay irrational for longer then he could stay solvent.
Both Tesla and Nvidia valuations are irrational from a market perspective. Doesn't mean they'll crash within the next months or even years, but it wouldn't be surprising if they did
chung8123 | 4 hours ago
bdcravens | 3 hours ago
by "anymore" I assume you mean for a few decades now
kamaal | 3 hours ago
Nah, it might appear so, but the moment of reckoning always arrives, always. Like eventually, it arrives.
Its a different argument, that most people themselves are not long-term investors, in that case of course, such a thing doesn't even apply to you.
I think Fidelity did some research that the most profitable accounts belonged to dead people. The proven formula is to pick the best stocks out there, pyramid upwards and be patient.
whazor | 6 hours ago
But Micheals arguments are valid. There could be competition, or even local models, thus indeed becoming 'commoditized'.
cyanydeez | 6 hours ago
jappgar | 6 hours ago
orwin | 6 hours ago
Because I used frontier models this weekend (I had 78% of my assigned tokens for this month left, I wanted to burn them before June 1st, ended up with 24% left), and tbh, I don't see much of the improvement compared to the models I use day-to-day. I'd rather pay less for a slightly worse model. Stacktrace analysis (or any bug analysis really) is where LLMs have the most success rate imho, and free models are good enough since last year. As for coding/architecture tasks, frontier models seems to hallucinate less, but I wonder if it's the guardrails or the he model themselves.
bpt3 | 5 hours ago
The problem with all these companies is that they are priced as if their training and inference costs are going to come way down, but somehow only for them specifically.
sourcecodeplz | 5 hours ago
alberto467 | 5 hours ago
EDIT: i still find absurd thinking that all those subscription would go to a single company, let me be clear. But that $50 price doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
dgellow | 4 hours ago
Anthropic and OpenAI are losing lots of money with their subscriptions. They are giving away access to those powerful models for cheap. The Deepseek price is the API price, which is the only sustainable approach here
jansan | 6 hours ago
We all know the market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent if you bet against it. If you watched "The Long Short" (excellent movie btw.) you know how close Michael Burry came to capitulation before his subprime bet paid off. He seems to have a tendency to be too early with his predictions, even with his genius GameStop investment. So while he may be right again fundamentally, his timing may be completely off and those companies could be "worth" significantly more than a trillion dollars, at least temporarily, in stock valuations.
My personal prediction is this: The hype will go on longer than people think, just like with the New Economy. There is this quote from market analyst Larry Wachtel in 1999 who said: "Everybody's happy, everybody's making money - something's wrong here"[1]. Ironically, even Wachtel eventually succumbed to FOMO, capitulated, went in late, and lost a lot of money[2]. I am trying to not make his mistake, but it will be tempting to do so, I am sure about that.
[1] https://youtu.be/uaK5tsH59UM?t=1188
[2] https://youtu.be/DSVPsP0Bfx0?t=456
jklowden | 3 hours ago
To believe the valuation, Anthropic earnings need to grow 100x. For a more likely outcome, I can recommend a bridge in Brooklyn.
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
schonfinkel | 6 hours ago
abirch | 6 hours ago
I need to figure out the next one.
The famous quote, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," is widely attributed to the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946
idiotsecant | 4 hours ago
IAmBroom | 2 hours ago
The date is hidden in the last 8 digits of pi. Should be a snap for a smart person like you.
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql | 2 hours ago
jstummbillig | 6 hours ago
mrits | 6 hours ago
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
danaris | 5 hours ago
raddan | 5 hours ago
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680124...
iso1631 | 5 hours ago
pjmlp | 4 hours ago
idiotsecant | 4 hours ago
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
l23k4 | 5 hours ago
Do you have access to the internet? Seemingly yes.
The booms just tend to be much bigger than the busts.
enraged_camel | 5 hours ago
Same with a lot of physical infrastructure. The UK has a robust railroad network today, but it was built during a bubble that was so insane people would take loans from banks to invest in railroad stocks.
monooso | 5 hours ago
simianwords | 5 hours ago
How does it matter to you? If you had invested in Internet broadly, you would have been WAY better off in the long term. Meaning: your strategy had been to keep investments tied to Internet first companies, you would have done better than pretty much any other person.
Things go up and down but broadly internet went up.
pjmlp | 4 hours ago
simianwords | 4 hours ago
So evidence that internet was a bubble is wrong, it in fact shows that pensions did the right thing by putting money in the internet.
pjmlp | 3 hours ago
l23k4 | an hour ago
prewett | an hour ago
Now, if you had put your money in those stocks 12 months later, you would do okay (except for Sun). So, no, those pensions did not do the right thing by buying at the peak of a bubble. At least, not for people like me who don't like 15 years of negative returns.
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...
[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/cisco/stock-price-history/
SirFatty | 5 hours ago
pjmlp | 5 hours ago
simonsarris | an hour ago
On January 31st 2023 Michael Burry just tweeted out "Sell"
that period was the market bottom, which has rocketed since then. (QQQ more than doubled)
jstummbillig | 45 minutes ago
lostmsu | 4 hours ago
helsinkiandrew | 6 hours ago
1. Do an IPO.
2. Sell a small amount (5%) to price insensitive Elon Musk-fans at a $2 trillion valuation
3. Get in all the indexes, because you are huge.
4. Unlock more stock, which the index funds have to purchase
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-06-01/the...
baxtr | 6 hours ago
helsinkiandrew | 6 hours ago
tossandthrow | 5 hours ago
My impressions is that US investors also have a special love for the S&P500 and could likely benefit from a non-US bias.
mapt | 5 hours ago
throwfaraway4 | 5 hours ago
bpt3 | 5 hours ago
Buy alternative ETFs with similar performance and low fees. VIG is one example.
iso1631 | 5 hours ago
Almost every stock in VIG is in the S&P.
bpt3 | 5 hours ago
Luc | 5 hours ago
uriahlight | 6 hours ago
martinclayton | 5 hours ago
Seems equivalent to removing road safety rules for the least-tested, most-powerful new vehicles only.
bombcar | 5 hours ago
brainwad | 5 hours ago
martinclayton | 4 hours ago
Quote from Cameron Lilja, Nasdaq's global head of index solutions:
"It is not necessarily representative to have a company that's big and could have a sizable representation in the index to keep them out for that long," Lilja said in an interview. "We're seeing share and corporate structures change - and companies that are staying private considerably longer are thus growing to be truly mega-cap companies before they even come to the public markets."
There's been fewer IPOs recently so Nasdaq and competitors are all racing to woo the few big ones to list with them.
Ekaros | 4 hours ago
martinclayton | 3 hours ago
https://resourcehub.bakermckenzie.com/en/resources/cross-bor...
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050515/how-n...
rlt | an hour ago
They should just have their own criteria for inclusion in the fund.
wewewedxfgdf | 5 hours ago
Whoever you are Michael Burry, you don't know shit about the implications, and where this is headed, and that the party only just got started.
I sure do wish I had a big chunk of that overpriced Google IPO stock, and Amazon, and MS, and Apple, etc etc etc
saidnooneever | 5 hours ago
please go back to school
axegon_ | 5 hours ago
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
bhokbah | 5 hours ago
Translation (took me while to understand this sentence):
So the company that actually solved the problem of making a computer program write other computer programs
kys11 | 4 hours ago
LightBug1 | 5 hours ago
schonfinkel | 5 hours ago
spwa4 | 5 hours ago
https://michaeljburry.substack.com/
And the counterpoint is that META, GOOG, AMZN, MSFT are all betting their companies that AI is the next move. Just yesterday, GOOG lent another $80 billion to be invested in their AI hardware, and they're also investing their own stock in AI hardware, for a cumulative investment of already over $1 trillion. Clearly the tech sector thinks this is worth it.
And of course the people deciding in FANG companies actually have numbers, Michael Burry has the same numbers you have. So these investments are "worth it" according to people with inside information. What Burry is doing, in one perspective, is calling out the leadership of FANG companies. Now that's the job of a short-seller of course. But that's the bet being made.
iso1631 | 5 hours ago
The only reason AI is worth $1T is if you believe it will continue to get better and displace all those jobs, not just in claude replacing knowlege workers, but in the outcome of that work being so transformational that physical work is also replaced.
If it does, then the entire economy is completely turned over and it doesn't really matter as nobody will have a job, and thus the entire concept of the S&P and the western economy as a whole falls to bits.
10xDev | 5 hours ago
chvid | 5 hours ago
Perhaps private equity has become so skilled that when they finally sell to the public they leave nothing on table.
kjksf | 2 hours ago
Granted, their profitability is better but in 2021 they were (rationally) valued based on Great Expectations which didn't pan out.
Now they're (rationally) valued on Much Less Great Expectations.
So I think it has nothing to do with skills of early investors (not the boogeymen, irrelevant private equity) and everything to do with Coinbase being a fast growth company at the time of IPO and being negative growth company after IPO.
directevolve | an hour ago
“Leaving nothing on the table” would mean selling few enough shares at the IPO that you have to overpay to get shares at the IPO. Previous valuations are known, as is that implied by each choice of IPO price when looking at the book. So the skill is just in the company not needing all that much money and being great at generating hype.
tejohnso | 5 hours ago
simianwords | 4 hours ago
I believe that Anthropic is worth $1T. I believe it won't go below it (inflation adjusted) for the next 2+ years. How do I make money with this?
vfalbor | 4 hours ago
dgellow | 4 hours ago
batperson | 3 hours ago
I'm no expert but I think eventually we'll have even more specialized ASIC like machines with models burned into them and a that will absorb a chunk of the market, similar to what happened to crypto mining but to a lesser degree since the work isn't as static.
josefritzishere | 4 hours ago