Michael Burry says he has major doubts about SpaceX and Anthropic's lofty valuations.
In recent discussion threads on his Substack, the investor of "The Big Short" fame questioned the worth of Elon Musk's rocket, satellite, and AI company, and the maker of popular AI model Claude.
"Any move up will be on hype and technicals," Burry wrote about SpaceX stock in a subscriber chat he started on Saturday. "Nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion."
SpaceX filed an IPO prospectus known as an S-1 on May 20, revealing that last year it made $18.7 billion in revenue and posted a net loss of $4.9 billion. It is widely reported to be targeting a valuation of roughly $2 trillion as a public company.
Anthropic announced last Thursday that it had raised capital at a $965 billion valuation, paving the way for a public listing at an even higher valuation.
Reacting to the news, Burry said in a subscriber chat that he's skeptical the AI startup will ever warrant that price tag.
"There is no guarantee, and not even a strong likelihood, that Anthropic is long-term worth anywhere near $1 trillion," he wrote.
Burry added that Anthropic's business of developing cutting-edge AI models is "far too expensive, too much brute force," as over time, he expects computing power "will be commoditized, like internet use."
"What is happening now is a false demand signal," he wrote, echoing his recent warning that the "tokenmaxxing" trend won't last.
The frantic rush to secure computing power to run AI models is "driving buildout and orders that will be too much for what is needed a few years down the road," he added.
Burry quipped that before paying $1 trillion for Anthropic, he would count to 1 trillion, and "in 240,000 years I might reconsider."
SpaceX and Anthropic didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Burry shot to fame after his prescient bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble was chronicled in the book and movie "The Big Short."
Known for issuing grave predictions about crashes and recessions, he pivoted from running a hedge fund to writing about his personal investments on Substack late last year.
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Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the Trending team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team in 2024. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, Jeremy Grantham and other top-flight investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at [email protected] and follow him on X @theron_mohamed.Expertise
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