Finance

'Big Short' investor Michael Burry says he's steering clear of SpaceX: 'No thank you'

Dr. Michael Burry
Famed investor Michael Burry isn't shorting SpaceX. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
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Michael Burry, the famed investor behind the "Big Short," says he's staying away from SpaceX's red-hot stock.

SpaceX went public last week in the biggest IPO in market history, and its stock has rallied sharply since, rising from its initial price of $135 per share to $202 at Tuesday's close, a 50% gain in just 3 days of trading.

In a Tuesday post on his Substack, Burry updated followers on his stock portfolio and said he won't be betting on or against Elon Musk's rocket company for the time being.

Burry shared details of several put options that would allow him to bet against SpaceX's stock, saying he was "tempted," but wouldn't get involved.

"No thank you," he wrote.

"I am not involved with SpaceX now. Neither short nor, ahem, long," Burry wrote in a tongue-in-cheek allusion to his long-held misgivings about the company.

Burry questioned SpaceX's potential valuation ahead of the IPO, saying in early June that he didn't believe it was worth $1 trillion.

"Nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion," he wrote in a subscriber chat on his Substack at the time.

"At $2.8 TRILLION market cap, SpaceX, which is fundamentally a small space company, a niche telecom, a bedeviled social media company, and a Coreweave-light, has less than $20 billion in total revenue," Burry wrote on Tuesday.

While Burry isn't trading options in SpaceX, as Business Insider's Joe Ciolli wrote in his "First Trade" newsletter this morning, lots of investors are.

More than 1.6 million options contracts were traded on Tuesday, the first day options were available. That's almost five times the previous first-day record after Facebook's 2012 IPO.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Burry's SpaceX value comparisons

Elon Musk speaks from a Nasdaq desk on a video conference during the SpaceX IPO.
SpaceX went public in the biggest IPO ever last week.  Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Burry continued his Substack post by sharing a lengthy list of things that SpaceX is worth more than on paper. These included the whole economies of Russia, Canada, and Italy.

"SpaceX's market cap could buy Page, Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Arnault, Huang, Buffett, and Ortega and still have $1 trillion left over. Those are the numbers 2-10 richest people in the world, after Elon," he wrote, continuing that the company's net worth could "buy every single US aerospace and defense company and have money left to buy every gold miner and airline in the world."

He then drew a line between SpaceX and Warren Buffett, noting that Musk's personal net worth is now more than the entire market capitalization of Berkshire Hathaway.

"Berkshire Hathaway has been eclipsed 2 1/2 times over in just three days. Berkshire Hathaway, painstakingly assembled over two century-old lives. The two greatest investors of our time," Burry wrote, referring to Buffett and his late right-hand man, Charlie Munger.

Burry shot to fame after his prescient bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble was turned into 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.

Burry's comments on SpaceX came as part of a wider update on his stock portfolio, in which he told followers he had increased his positions in the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba and pet pharmaceutical firm Zoetis.

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Will Martin
Will Martin
Will Martin is a senior business editor with 10 years of experience in various roles at Business Insider. He works with a team of reporters and editors to cover everything from Big Tech, to the aviation industry, to fast food.Prior to working on the business news team, Will led Insider's sports coverage in the company's London bureau, publishing award-nominated work on alleged gang involvement in elite boxing, deeply-reported features on a civil war in Olympic sport modern pentathlon, and profiles of some of the biggest rising-stars in soccer.Before joining the sports team, Will spent a year as an associate editor on Insider's global news team. Before that, Will worked as a markets and economics reporter for Business Insider for more than three years.During his time with the news team, Will assigned and edited reporting and features on everything from the Boeing 737 Max crisis, to the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China, to global geopolitics, and even a Barack Obama-themed service station in Ireland.He also personally reported on allegations of illegal mass human organ harvesting in China.Prior to working for Insider, Will gained a BA in International Relations from the University of Exeter, and an MA in Financial Journalism at City, University of London.You can reach him by email on: wmartin@businessinsider.comOr via Twitter: @willmartin19