Michael Burry revealed he’s not betting against Tesla right now, but sees a compelling case for betting against Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company.
“If I’m tweeting this, you can bet I’m not short,” said va now deleted tweet on Tuesday. โBut I should be.
As evidence of the automaker’s bleak outlook, Burry pointed to a CNBC story about a Tesla Megapack battery burning Tuesday at a PG&E energy warehouse in California.
Burry’s Scion Asset Management held bearish put options on nearly 1.1 million shares of Tesla at the end of June 2021. But it exited the position during the third quarter of last year.
The fund manager of “The Big Short” fame has repeatedly targeted Tesla during the pandemic. In December 2020, he revealed that he was short the company, calling its share price “ridiculous”.
โWell, my last Big Short was bigger and bigger and BIGGER,โ Burry tweeted in January 2021 after Tesla shares soared. “Enjoy it while you can.”
A few weeks later, the investor compared the massive buzz around Tesla to the speculative mania during the dot-com and real estate bubbles.
Burry also warned that Tesla’s stock could fall 90%, criticized the company’s poor sales and profits compared to its competitors, and described its battery technology as “inferior” following numerous reports of Tesla vehicles catching fire. In April of this year, he warned that “competition is coming” for Tesla.
The Scion boss also took aim directly at Musk. In November, he accused Tesla’s CEO of selling his company’s stock to pay off his personal debts and capitalize on its heady valuation.
“Burries are broken clocks,” Musk he answered on Twitter, referring to the investor’s penchant for relentlessly making dire predictions. In another tweet, Musk jokingly called Burry a “bastard” for shorting Tesla.
Tesla’s stock price has soared nearly 700% in 2020 and is up another 73% through November 2021, lifting the company’s market cap north of $1.2 trillion. However, the automaker’s shares have since retreated by 26%.
Burry is best known for predicting and profiting from the collapse of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s after his contrarian trade was immortalized in the book and movie “The Big Short.”
The investor also inadvertently helped inspire GameStop’s brief squeeze and the broader meme-stock movement when it bought a stake in the video game retailer and pushed its bosses to make changes in 2019.
Read more: Expert Michael Burry breaks down what makes the “Big Short” investor special. It also revisits Burry’s iconic bet against the housing bubble and his bets on GameStop, Tesla and Ark.
