- Burry was played by Christian Bale in the 2015 financial thriller
A hedge fund manager made famous for major bets against the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis is set to close his firm.
Michael Burry, who was played by Christian Bale in 2015 financial thriller The Big Short, has deregistered Scion Asset Management after 25 years in business and returning capital to investors.
Documents held by the US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission show Scion’s registration status at ‘terminated’ as of 10 November.
Deregistering would imply the fund is not required to file reports with the regulator or any state.
It comes after Burry made major bets against tech giants linked to the artificial intelligence boom that he believes are vastly overvalued.
Scion, which boasted $155billion in assets under management as of March, is understood to have bought more than $1billion in put options betting against chip giant Nvidia and software giant Palantir Technologies.
These options pay off when share prices fall.
Starring role: Christian Bale played Michael Burry in the Big Short
But despite a recent wobble led by ‘AI bubble’ fears, Nvidia and Palantir shares have added more than 35 and 128 per cent, respectively, since the start of 2025.
Burry’s bets were questioning the cloud infrastructure boom and accusing major providers of using aggressive accounting to inflate profits from their massive hardware investments.
He thinks that while the likes of Microsoft, Alphabet-owned Google, Oracle and Meta are pouring billions into Nvidia chips and servers, they are also quietly stretching out depreciation schedules to make earnings look smoother
Between 2026 and 2028, those accounting choices could understate depreciation by about $176 billion, inflating reported profits across the sector, Burry estimated.
AI-related stocks have accounted for 75 per cent of the S&P 500 index’s returns since November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, according to J.P. Morgan Asset Management research published in September.
The Financial Times reports that Bury has told investors he will liquidate funds and return capital to investors by year-end – ‘but for a small audit/tax holdsback’.
He reportedly wrote in a 27 October letter: ‘My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.’
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