Michael Burry

Michael James Burry (/ˈbɜːri/; born June 19, 1971)^[2] is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He founded the hedge fund Scion Capital, which later went by the name Scion Asset Management. In 2025, Burry announced he was shutting down Scion Asset Management.

Michael Burry
Born	Michael James Burry (1971-06-19) June 19, 1971 (age 54) San Jose, California, U.S.[1]
Education	University of California, Los Angeles (BA) Vanderbilt University (MD)
Occupations	Investor hedge fund manager
Known for	Founding and managing Scion Asset Management

He is best known for being among the first investors to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis.

Early life and education

Burry was born and raised in San Jose, California. At the age of two he lost his left eye to retinoblastoma^[3] and has had a prosthetic eye ever since.^[4] As a teenager, he attended the public Santa Teresa High School.^[5][6]

He studied economics and pre-med at the University of California, Los Angeles, and earned an MD degree from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1997.^[7] After graduating, he would partially complete his residency^[8] in neurology at Stanford University Medical Center.^[9] While off duty, he spent time working on his hobby: financial investing.^[9]

Despite not practicing, Burry has kept his license as a physician active with the Medical Board of California, including continuing education requirements.^[10][8]

Investment career

Main article: Scion Asset Management

After medical school, Burry worked as a Stanford Hospital neurology resident, and then a Stanford Hospital pathology resident, however he completed neither residency.

He then left to start his own hedge fund. He had already developed a reputation as an investor by demonstrating success in value investing, which he wrote about on message boards on the stock discussion site Silicon Investor beginning in 1996. He was so successful with his stock picks that he attracted the interest of companies such as Vanguard, White Mountains Insurance Group and prominent investors such as Joel Greenblatt. Burry has a strictly traditional understanding of value. He has said more than once that his investment style is built upon Benjamin Graham and David Dodd’s 1934 book Security Analysis: "All my stock picking is 100% based on the concept of a margin of safety."^[11]

Burry was reported as taking a short position in Amazon on February 21, 2000 in the SF Chronicle which he touted in 2025 when announcing a newsletter to layout his AI bubble fears.^[12] Amazon would lose about 80-percent of its value over the next year amid the dot com bubble. After shutting down his website in November 2000, Burry started the hedge fund Scion Capital, funded by an inheritance and loans from his family. He named it after Terry Brooks' The Scions of Shannara (1990), one of his favorite novels. He quickly earned extraordinary profits for his investors.^[13]

In 2005, Burry started to focus on the subprime market. Through his analysis of mortgage lending practices in 2003 and 2004, he correctly predicted that the real estate bubble would collapse as early as 2007. His research on the values of residential real estate convinced him that subprime mortgages, especially those with "teaser" rates, and the bonds based on these mortgages, would begin losing value when the original rates were replaced by much higher rates, often in as little as two years after initiation. This conclusion led him to short the market by persuading Goldman Sachs and other investment firms to sell him credit default swaps against subprime deals he saw as vulnerable.^[14][15][16]

During his payments toward the credit default swaps, Burry suffered an investor revolt, where some investors in his fund worried his predictions were inaccurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Eventually, Burry's analysis proved correct: He made a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.^[7]

In 2008, following the investor revolt and his subsequent financial victory, Burry shut down Scion Capital.^[17]

In an April 3, 2010 op-ed for The New York Times, Burry argued that anyone who studied the financial markets carefully in 2003, 2004, and 2005 could have recognized the growing risk in the subprime markets.^[18] He faulted federal regulators for failing to listen to warnings from outside a closed circle of advisors.^[18][16]

In 2013, Burry reopened the Scion hedge fund under the name Scion Asset Management. Its aim was to generate personal investments, which include water, farmland, and gold.^[19]

In 2025, Burry's 13-F^[20] filings revealed short positions in Nvidia and Palantir, in the forms of Put options, another position contrary to general market consensus. This sparked public interest online, as he was once again taking a short, opposing position, to the general market. Burry also posted on X,^[21] alluding to the idea of an "AI Bubble." In further filings, Burry has withdrawn Scion Asset Management from the SEC's registration, effectively closing down his fund.^[22]

In late 2025, Burry deregistered his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management. In a post on X in late November, Burry said "On to much better things Nov 25th" and the SEC database showed Scion's registration status as terminated.^[23] On November 24, 2025 he would announce a newsletter with a $379 annual fee which will layout his fears about an AI bubble related to his short positions in Nvidia and Palantir. ^[24]

Personal life

Burry is married and lived in Saratoga, California, in 2010 with his two adult sons,^[9] one of whom was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Burry believes he also has Asperger’s after reading about the condition.^[9][25][7]

Burry was highly critical of the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.^[26]

In popular culture

Film

• Burry is portrayed by Christian Bale in the 2015 film The Big Short.^[27]

Literature

• 2010: Michael Lewis, The Big Short
• 2009: Gregory Zuckerman, The Greatest Trade Ever