Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T(businessinsider.com) |
Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T(businessinsider.com) |
Burry is well aware of this, he has written about how passive investing is contributing to this problem.
> 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...
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.
There are no fundamentals.
There is very low signal to the noise.
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.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
A long-term principle that I think does still apply.
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine”
- benjamin graham
by "anymore" I assume you mean for a few decades now
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.
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
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'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.
Seems equivalent to removing road safety rules for the least-tested, most-powerful new vehicles only.
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.
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
Perhaps private equity has become so skilled that when they finally sell to the public they leave nothing on table.
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.
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...
But Micheals arguments are valid. There could be competition, or even local models, thus indeed becoming 'commoditized'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To believe the valuation, Anthropic earnings need to grow 100x. For a more likely outcome, I can recommend a bridge in Brooklyn.
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.
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?
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).
So he really relies on zero fundamental analysis these days
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.
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.
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
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
please go back to school
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
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.
Paul Graham doesn't think so
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...
Isn’t this the exact same sentiment from the late 1920s when people were making “insane, life changing” money by buying equities on margin?
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.
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.
Do you have access to the internet? Seemingly yes.
The booms just tend to be much bigger than the busts.
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.
- 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.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...
Might I interest you in some bridges sir?
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.
It also has no path to become profitable.
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.
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?
The date is hidden in the last 8 digits of pi. Should be a snap for a smart person like you.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze#:~:text...
https://resourcehub.bakermckenzie.com/en/resources/cross-bor...
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050515/how-n...
My impressions is that US investors also have a special love for the S&P500 and could likely benefit from a non-US bias.
Buy alternative ETFs with similar performance and low fees. VIG is one example.
Almost every stock in VIG is in the S&P.
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.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680124...