Michael Burry: "The market has jumped the shark"

On May 8 and 11, 2026, Michael Burry — the investor who bet against the U.S. housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis and was later portrayed in The Big Short — published a series of posts on his Substack declaring that stocks are at a critical turning point. His language was pointed: "I am calling something. The market has jumped the shark." 1

What Burry said — and the numbers behind it

Burry's core argument is that stocks are no longer moving on economic fundamentals. 2 He wrote:

"Stocks are not up or down because of jobs or consumer sentiment. They are going straight up because they have been going straight up. On a two letter thesis that everyone thinks they understand. ... Feeling like the last months of the 1999-2000 bubble."

That "two letter thesis" is AI. Burry described the current media environment as "Absolutely non-stop AI. Nobody is talking about anything else all day." 2

He pointed to a specific comparison to anchor the bubble thesis: BTIG (a New York-based institutional brokerage) analysis shows the top 10 performers in the NASDAQ 100 (NDX) gained an average of 784% over the past year — surpassing the 622% average gain those categories of stocks posted in the year before the dot-com peak in March 2000. 1 The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) is up 65% year-to-date; the NASDAQ 100 gained 16% in a single month. 2

Burry said the NASDAQ 100 is due for a "complete reversal" — the pattern "suddenly dawned on me" because he had "lived this before." 1 He disclosed that he has taken significant leveraged short positions, though against individual companies he considers "depressed and cheap" rather than the broad indices. He added: "My only thought now, this weekend, today, is to let people know where we are. We are witnessing history. In the stock market, that is not a good thing." 1

"The boy who cried wolf" — and why he says this time is different

Burry acknowledged upfront that his repeated crash predictions have earned him skepticism:

"I am now a meme for the number of times I have called a crash. Today, however, I am telling." 3

He listed his prior track record in his own defense: correct call in 2000, correct in 2007, correct in 2019 (a judgment he said COVID helped bear out), correct on the meme-stock crash in mid-2021, and a warning on bank stocks in 2023. 3 His self-framing: "I have become the boy who cried wolf. History is written not by the victors, but by those that control the pen, and social media has that pen right now, it seems. Still, I got it right in 2000, got it right in 2007."

His closing line in the Substack post was five words: "The end of…this…is nigh." 1

Three independent signals pointing the same direction

Burry is not the only prominent voice raising this alarm in the same week. Fortune's senior editor-at-large Shawn Tully synthesized three separate, independent data points in a May 13 article: 4

Burry (Substack, May 8–11): the qualitative bubble call described above.
Paul Tudor Jones (CNBC Squawk Box, May 7): Jones — billionaire founder and CIO of Tudor Investment Corporation, who predicted and profited from the 1987 Black Monday crash — compared today's AI-driven market to 1999. He estimated the AI cycle is roughly 50–60% complete with "another year or two to run," but warned that if U.S. stock market capitalization reaches 300–350% of GDP (it stood at 252% of GDP as of his interview) the correction could be severe: "Just imagine the stock market went up another 40% ... you just know that there'll be some ... breathtaking kind of corrections." 5 Jones disclosed that he still bought more AI stocks recently.
Robert Shiller's CAPE ratio (data as of May 11): The Cyclically-Adjusted Price Earnings ratio — a metric developed by Yale professor emeritus and 2013 Nobel laureate in Economics Robert Shiller that uses a 10-year average of inflation-adjusted earnings to reduce the distortion from peak earnings cycles — reached 40.3. 4 In 145 years of recorded data, CAPE has exceeded 40 during exactly one continuous period: January 1999 to September 2000. After that peak, the S&P 500 took more than 12 years to return to those levels in nominal terms.

Jones and Burry are making different arguments — Jones sees the AI productivity boom as real and ongoing, while Burry frames the whole move as pure momentum detached from fundamentals. They converge only on the conclusion that what goes up at this speed comes down hard. Tully's framing of the broader situation: "The incredible run we're witnessing may have a simple explanation: Sometimes, markets just go crazy." 4

Who is Michael Burry

Michael Burry is the founder and portfolio manager of Scion Asset Management, a California-based investment firm. He first came to public attention after his prescient short position against mortgage-backed securities ahead of the 2008 housing collapse — documented in Michael Lewis's 2010 book The Big Short and the 2015 film adaptation in which he was portrayed by Christian Bale. His approach is deep-value and contrarian: he seeks assets where he believes the market has materially mispriced risk, often taking positions that run against prevailing sentiment for months or years before they pay off (or don't). His current leveraged short positions are against individual companies he views as overvalued, not the broad market indices.

Cover image: Photo by Michael Ostuni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images, as published in Michael Burry, Paul Tudor Jones, and a Nobel-winner all see the same thing: A stock market reckoning