top of page

By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 4:53:13 pm

The Great Contrarian

Michael Burry made his reputation by seeing through the housing boom. Now he is turning his scepticism on AI by questioning the stories being told about it. Michael Burry has always had an uncomfortable relationship with consensus. When everyone else sees a boom, he tends to look for the balance sheet underneath it. Recently, when some of the globe’s most powerful executives began telling the public that Artificial Intelligence is something is both enormously valuable and dangerously...

The Great Contrarian

Michael Burry made his reputation by seeing through the housing boom. Now he is turning his scepticism on AI by questioning the stories being told about it. Michael Burry has always had an uncomfortable relationship with consensus. When everyone else sees a boom, he tends to look for the balance sheet underneath it. Recently, when some of the globe’s most powerful executives began telling the public that Artificial Intelligence is something is both enormously valuable and dangerously powerful, Burry’s instinct was to wonder who benefits from the story. Burry’s instinct – of saying directly that the Emperor has no clothes – has made him famous. As the physician-turned-investor immortalised in 2015 film The Big Short, Burry was one of the investors who saw the fragility of America’s housing market before the financial crisis of 2008. While Wall Street was busy packaging subprime mortgages into increasingly elaborate securities, he concluded that the loans were deteriorating, lending standards were weakening and house prices could not keep rising simply because the financial system assumed they would. This month, as some of the world’s most prominent AI executives began warning that the technology could produce catastrophic consequences unless its development was slowed, Burry again took aim at the argument. In a post on his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, he described the warnings from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Elon Musk as “self-serving” and suggested that the language of impending catastrophe was serving a very different purpose from public safety. Burry pulled no punches when he said that the technology’s boosters and its doomers can sometimes be selling the same product. Burry’s suspicion is that the more extraordinary AI appears, the more extraordinary its valuations become. The same behemoths then warn that AI development must be slowed, gain time and protection from their competitors. Burry’s suspicion is particularly pointed because OpenAI and Anthropic have been moving towards possible public listings at enormous valuations. Inc. reported his argument on September 16, noting his contention that AI safety warnings could provide “cover” for slowing growth and postponing IPO plans. Burry’s provocative formulation is that large language models are not themselves artificial general intelligence, and the industry’s rhetoric about slowing “AI” therefore risks confusing a specific class of technologies with a much broader hypothetical future. The current AI debate has increasingly acquired the language of science fiction when it speaks of machines that might escape human control and autonomous systems that might manipulate infrastructure. While such scenarios deserve examination, Burry asks a more mundane question: what if the companies issuing the warnings have commercial incentives that are being overlooked? It is a question characteristic of the man who became famous by reading the footnotes while everyone else watched the headline. Burry’s scepticism toward AI is not new. Since launching Cassandra Unchained in November 2025, he has made the economics of the AI boom one of its central subjects. His writings have examined what he calls “supply-side gluttony”, the enormous investment in AI infrastructure and the financial assumptions underlying the industry. He has also taken short positions against several beneficiaries of the AI boom, including Nvidia and Palantir, arguing that the market may be pricing in too much future success. In one series, The Heretic’s Guide to AI’s Stars, he has examined the accounts of Nvidia and the major hyperscalers, focusing on capital spending, financing arrangements, customer concentration, depreciation and other details that can disappear beneath the headline numbers. His argument is not simply that AI companies are overvalued. He sees familiar patterns in the rush to build infrastructure before the economic returns have been established. In June, he wrote that he had seen something similar before and compared the current AI capital flows with the exuberance of the late 1990s. Burry’s reputation has not been built on predicting every future development. Rather, it was built on being willing to ask whether the story everyone else was telling was supported by the evidence. The housing crisis taught investors that financial innovation could conceal old-fashioned bad lending. The AI boom may yet teach markets that revolutionary technology can coexist with inflated expectations and extraordinary valuations. Burry’s great talent is refusing to accept the present at face value. In a market increasingly dominated by grand claims about machines that will either save civilization or destroy it, that may be the most contrarian position of all.

Selective Outrage

Correspondent
May 9, 2025
2 min read

India’s left-liberal media has long prided itself on being the torchbearer of secularism, dissent and moral rectitude. In the aftermath of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ the precision military strike launched by the Modi government against Pakistan-based terror camps, it has revealed its not a principled commitment to peace or truth, but a disturbing penchant for ideological prejudice, performative sanctimony and selective outrage.


The operation itself was a textbook display of calibrated force and geopolitical prudence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, often caricatured as ‘authoritarian’ by the ‘liberal’ English-language commentariat, chose patience over provocation. He consulted opposition leaders, held detailed discussions with defence chiefs and took key international stakeholders, notably the United States and Russia, into confidence before authorising limited military action. The symbolism of ‘Operation Sindoor’ was also carefully crafted: a pointed reminder that the attack’s real victims were Hindu women widowed by Pakistan-sponsored militants in Kashmir. The government’s briefings were also strategic and symbolic as two ranking female officers, one of them Muslim, were made the public face of the mission, underlining a new Indian confidence that blends military muscle with democratic pluralism.


But this was unacceptable for India’s entrenched ‘left-liberal’ press, steeped in academic jargon, Western validation and a knee-jerk hostility to anything remotely ‘Hindutva.’ That a Muslim officer briefed the nation on ‘Operation Sindoor’ was branded ‘tokenism’ by such commentators. Others crudely alleged that the April 22 Pahalgam massacre was the logical culmination of reported atrocities against Muslims since Modi came to power in 2014.


The semantic nitpicking over ‘Operation Sindoor’ was maddening. An editor of a prominent magazine dubbed the operation’s name as ‘patriarchal’ and coded in Hindutva tropes. In a bizarre case of moral inversion, sindoor was likened to symbols of ‘honour killings’ and gender oppression, ignoring both its cultural resonance and the cruel reality that these women had lost their husbands in cold blood. For years, India’s ‘secular’ commentariat nurtured a preordained binary: the Congress may be flawed but was at least ‘secular’ while the BJP was an inveterate ‘fascist.’ Thus, the 2002 Gujarat riots are always focused upon but the Congress-backed pogrom of the Sikhs in 1984 is either downplayed or rationalised. Terrorism in Kashmir is tragic, but state retaliation is ‘jingoism.’ A strong Muslim voice in government is ‘tokenism’ but its absence is ‘exclusion.’ Even journalistic rigour is selectively applied. When Pakistan claimed to have downed Indian jets, some Indian outlets rushed to amplify the story before verification, inadvertently echoing enemy propaganda.


Dissent is vital in any democracy. But when its becomes indistinguishable from disdain, when editorial choices are dictated by ideological conformity, then the press becomes a caricature of itself. Ironically, many of these journalists enjoy robust free speech and loudly lament India’s supposed slide into ‘fascism’ from the safety of their X handles. Yet they turn a blind eye to Putin’s repression, Erdogan’s purges or Xi Jinping’s camps. In their eyes, Modi remains the greatest threat to democracy even as they broadcast their outrage freely, without fear of censorship or reprisal. ‘Operation Sindoor’ was a statement of cultural self-confidence. That confidence has rattled those who have spent their careers gatekeeping Indian discourse. Today, their monopoly is over. The people are watching and they no longer believe that the emperor has clothes.

Comments

bottom of page