Michael Burry

Michael Burry
Born	Michael James Burry 19 6, 1971
Birthplace	San Jose, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Investor, hedge fund manager, physician
Known for	Founding Scion Capital; predicting the subprime mortgage crisis
Education	University of California, Los Angeles (BA) Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (MD)
Website	[https://www.scionasset.com/ Official site]

Michael James Burry (born June 19, 1971) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and licensed physician who founded the hedge fund Scion Capital, later known as Scion Asset Management. Born in San Jose, California, Burry gained international recognition as one of the first investors to identify and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, a feat that brought him both enormous financial returns and lasting fame in the world of finance. His story was chronicled in Michael Lewis's bestselling 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine and the subsequent 2015 film adaptation The Big Short, in which he was portrayed by actor Christian Bale. A trained medical doctor who transitioned into finance through value investing, Burry has remained a prominent and often contrarian voice in financial markets, frequently issuing warnings about asset bubbles and market excesses. In 2025, Burry announced he was shutting down Scion Asset Management.

Early Life

Michael James Burry was born on June 19, 1971, in San Jose, California. As a young child, Burry lost his left eye to a rare form of cancer called retinoblastoma, and he has worn a glass eye since childhood. This early medical experience shaped aspects of his personality and worldview; Burry has spoken about how having a prosthetic eye contributed to difficulties in social interaction and a sense of being different from his peers.

Burry grew up in the San Jose area, part of Silicon Valley, during a period of rapid technological and economic growth in the region. Despite the challenges posed by his medical condition, he was an intellectually curious and academically driven student. From a young age, he displayed an aptitude for numbers and analytical thinking, traits that would later define his career in finance.

Burry has spoken publicly about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as an adult, after recognizing the condition in his son. He has attributed some of his investment success to characteristics associated with the condition, including an intense focus on detail and the ability to absorb and process large quantities of information over extended periods. His capacity for deep, solitary research would become a hallmark of his investment approach.

Education

Burry attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned a bachelor's degree. He subsequently enrolled at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he earned his Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree. Following medical school, Burry began a residency in neurology at Stanford University Medical Center.

However, Burry's interest in the stock market, which had developed during his time in medical school, increasingly competed with his medical career. During his residency, he spent his limited off-hours writing about value investing on early internet message boards and financial forums, where his detailed stock analyses attracted a following among other investors. His posts on the website Silicon Investor and his personal blog drew the attention of prominent figures in the financial world. Burry ultimately decided to leave medicine to pursue investing full-time, a decision that represented a significant departure from the path his education had charted. He holds a valid medical license in the state of California.

Career

Early Investing and Scion Capital

Burry's transition from medicine to finance was precipitated by the reputation he built as an amateur stock analyst on internet forums during the late 1990s. Writing in-depth analyses of undervalued companies in the tradition of Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, Burry attracted attention for the quality and rigor of his research. His online writing caught the notice of Joel Greenblatt of Gotham Capital, among other established investors, who recognized his analytical talent.

In 2000, Burry left his medical residency at Stanford and founded Scion Capital LLC, a hedge fund based in Cupertino, California. The name "Scion" was drawn from The Scions of Shannara, a fantasy novel by Terry Brooks, reflecting Burry's eclectic personal interests. He launched the fund with a modest amount of capital, much of it from a small inheritance following his father's death. Greenblatt was among the early investors in the fund.

From the outset, Burry pursued a deep value investing strategy, focusing on companies that were significantly undervalued relative to their intrinsic worth as determined by his own research. His approach was characterized by exhaustive analysis of financial filings, including obscure footnotes and appendices in 10-K reports that other investors typically overlooked. During its early years, Scion Capital generated strong returns. According to accounts of the fund's performance, Burry achieved returns of 55% in 2001, in a year when the S&P 500 fell by nearly 12%. He continued to outperform the broader market in subsequent years.

Burry's early stock picks included companies across various sectors that he determined were trading below their liquidation value or possessed assets that the market was not adequately pricing. He was noted for purchasing shares of Apple Inc. as early as 1998, long before the company's transformation under the leadership of Steve Jobs into one of the world's most valuable corporations.

Predicting the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Burry's defining professional achievement was his identification of the impending collapse of the subprime mortgage market, which he began analyzing in earnest around 2003 and 2004. Through meticulous examination of mortgage lending practices, loan-level data, and the structure of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), Burry concluded that a large segment of the American housing market was built on loans that borrowers would be unable to repay once introductory teaser rates expired. He determined that the securities built on these loans were dramatically overvalued and that the housing market was in the midst of an unsustainable bubble.

Beginning in 2005, Burry approached major Wall Street investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, to purchase credit default swaps (CDS) — essentially insurance contracts that would pay out if mortgage-backed securities defaulted. At the time, the idea that the housing market could experience a widespread collapse was considered implausible by most market participants, and Burry was able to obtain these contracts at what he regarded as extremely favorable terms.

Burry's position against the housing market created significant tension with his investors. As the housing bubble continued to inflate throughout 2006 and into 2007, the premiums Burry was paying on his credit default swaps eroded the fund's returns, leading to growing frustration and demands for redemptions from his limited partners. Several investors threatened legal action, and Burry took the unusual step of imposing restrictions on withdrawals to prevent a wave of redemptions that would have forced him to liquidate his positions before his thesis could be validated. This decision strained his relationships with investors and placed him under intense personal and professional pressure.

When the subprime mortgage market began to collapse in 2007 and the broader financial crisis erupted in 2008, Burry's credit default swaps generated substantial profits. By the time Scion Capital's positions were unwound, the fund had produced a reported personal profit of approximately $100 million for Burry and approximately $700 million for the fund's remaining investors. Over the period from the fund's inception in November 2000 to June 2008, Scion Capital generated returns of 489.34% (net of fees and expenses), compared with a gain of approximately 3% for the S&P 500 over the same period.

Despite the vindication of his thesis, the experience left Burry disillusioned with the investment management business and with the behavior of Wall Street institutions and regulators. In April 2010, he published an op-ed in The New York Times titled "I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn't the Fed?" in which he criticized the Federal Reserve and other regulatory bodies for failing to act on warning signs that were visible to those willing to examine the data.

Closing of Scion Capital and Return to Investing

Following the financial crisis, Burry closed Scion Capital in 2008, citing the personal toll of managing investor relationships during the housing bet and expressing frustration with the broader financial system. He turned his attention to personal investments, focusing on assets including water rights, farmland, and small-cap value stocks.

Burry later returned to fund management, establishing Scion Asset Management, which operated as a smaller fund and filed quarterly 13F reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), providing a public record of its equity holdings. Through Scion Asset Management, Burry continued to make concentrated bets on undervalued securities and occasionally took short positions against companies or sectors he believed to be overvalued.

In 2025, Burry announced that he was shutting down Scion Asset Management, bringing an end to his formal role as a hedge fund manager.

Market Commentary and Continued Influence

Even after closing his original fund, Burry has remained an influential voice in financial markets, primarily through social media posts on the platform X (formerly Twitter). His posts, which he frequently deletes shortly after publishing, are closely followed by financial media and retail investors alike. Burry has issued warnings about a range of market phenomena, including what he has characterized as excessive valuations in technology stocks and potential bubbles in various asset classes.

In recent years, Burry has been vocal about concerns related to the artificial intelligence boom, drawing comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. He has suggested that speculative enthusiasm surrounding AI-related companies may be unsustainable. In February 2026, Burry shared research from Citrini Research on X, highlighting a thought experiment questioning AI investment assumptions, commenting, "And you think I'm bearish." His skepticism has been met with pushback from industry figures, including data center executives who have disputed his bearish outlook on AI-related infrastructure spending.

Burry has also targeted specific companies. In early 2026, he flagged concerns about Palantir Technologies, highlighting CEO Alex Karp's reported $17.2 million in private jet expenses as disclosed in the company's annual filing, which Burry characterized as excessive. Analysts at The Motley Fool and other financial publications have noted that while Burry's contrarian calls attract significant attention, his track record on short-term market predictions since the 2008 crisis has been mixed.

In February 2026, Burry posted a self-audit on X outlining what he described as 26 years of major market calls. In this post, he acknowledged that he had "slept" on Bitcoin, noting that he had been aware of the cryptocurrency and had an early opportunity to purchase it in 2013 but did not follow through on the investment in a meaningful way.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Burry attracted attention for his criticism of government-imposed lockdowns, which he argued were disproportionate to the threat and would cause significant economic harm. He expressed these views publicly through social media and in interviews.

Personal Life

Burry resides in Saratoga, California. He has been open about his diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, which he received in adulthood after recognizing the traits in one of his children. Burry has stated that the characteristics associated with the condition — including an affinity for solitary, detail-oriented work and the ability to focus intensely on narrow topics for extended periods — were central to his success as an investor.

Despite his public profile, Burry is known for being reclusive. He has generally avoided the media spotlight and declined most interview requests over the years, preferring to communicate through his social media posts. His posts on X are notable for being frequently deleted shortly after publication, a pattern that has generated additional media attention and speculation.

Burry maintains a valid California medical license, though he has not practiced medicine since leaving his Stanford residency to pursue investing.

Recognition

The Big Short

Burry's role in predicting the subprime mortgage crisis was prominently featured in Michael Lewis's 2010 nonfiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, which became a New York Times bestseller. Lewis profiled Burry as one of several individuals who recognized the fragility of the mortgage-backed securities market and bet against it.

The book was adapted into the 2015 film The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay, in which actor Christian Bale portrayed Burry. Bale's performance was praised by critics and earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The film brought Burry's story to a broader audience and cemented his reputation as one of the central figures of the financial crisis narrative.

Bloomberg Risk Takers

Burry was profiled in the Bloomberg Television documentary series Risk Takers, which examined his career and investment philosophy.

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

Burry was interviewed by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), the body created by the U.S. government to examine the causes of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. His testimony provided an account of how he had identified the risks in the subprime mortgage market and the resistance he encountered from financial institutions and regulators when he attempted to raise concerns.

Legacy

Michael Burry's career has had a lasting impact on the public understanding of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and on the broader culture of investing. His story, as told through Michael Lewis's book and the subsequent film, has become a reference point for discussions about contrarian investing, the risks of financial innovation, and the failures of regulatory oversight.

Burry's investment approach — rooted in intensive, independent research and a willingness to take positions that contradict prevailing market sentiment — has been influential among a generation of individual and institutional investors. His emphasis on reading primary source documents, particularly SEC filings and loan-level data, rather than relying on analyst reports or consensus views, has been cited as a model for rigorous fundamental analysis.

His public warnings about various market phenomena, including technology stock valuations and the AI boom, have kept him in the public eye and ensured ongoing media coverage of his views, even after the closure of Scion Asset Management in 2025. While some of his post-crisis market calls have not materialized as predicted, his status as the investor who identified the subprime mortgage crisis before it occurred has given his pronouncements continued weight in financial discourse.

Burry's op-ed in The New York Times in 2010, in which he questioned why the Federal Reserve had not identified the same risks he had uncovered through publicly available data, contributed to the broader public debate about the accountability of financial regulators and the adequacy of the regulatory framework governing mortgage lending and securitization.

His career arc — from medical student writing stock analyses on internet forums to hedge fund manager who made one of the most celebrated market calls in financial history — has also become a prominent narrative about the democratization of financial analysis and the potential for independent thinkers outside the traditional Wall Street establishment to identify opportunities and risks that major institutions overlook.