Michael Burry, the U.S. short seller famous as the real-life figure behind the movie Big Short, said on the 8th (local time) that the stock rally "reminds me of just before the burst of the 2000 'dot-com bubble.'"
In a post on the online newsletter platform Substack, Burry said, "It's AI, AI, AI, without end. All day long, no one talks about anything else," sharing his thoughts after listening to business radio while on a long drive.
Burry said, "Stock prices aren't moving up and down on jobs reports or consumer sentiment releases; they just keep rising on AI," adding, "It feels like we've reached just before the 1999–2000 dot-com bubble burst." He then compared the recent surge in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index to the 2000 tech collapse. The index, which includes Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, Micron and TSMC, has jumped about 40% in the past month.
Burry foresaw the 2008 U.S. subprime mortgage loan crisis and amassed a fortune by shorting related asset prices. His story was made into the 2015 movie Big Short. However, because Burry's pessimistic predictions have often been wrong, Wall Street is cautious about taking his remarks at face value. When Burry criticized Tesla's stock as a bubble in 2021, Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive officer (CEO), mocked Burry as a "broken clock."