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

Michael Burry, the famed investor behind the “Big Short,” says he’s staying away from SpaceX’s red-hot stock.

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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 TRILLIONmarket 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.

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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

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’snet 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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