Burry's Crystal Ball: Shorts Up, Chips Down, Tesla in a Funk 🪩

Michael Burry disclosed a fresh basket of short positions against Tesla, Nvidia, Caterpillar, Applied Materials, and the broader semiconductor sector on June 30, and within days several of those corners of the market began to slide. Burry laid out the trades in a Substack post titled "Trading Post June 30, 2026," framing them as a single bet against an overheated AI cycle rather than isolated stock picks. He labeled the semiconductor index "a pure form of overvaluation" and rolled his SOXX puts out to March 2027, while also opening new shorts on Tesla at $416.22 and Caterpillar at $1,060.98, a stock he had never shorted before despite trading it profitably on the long side for years. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index was already trading more than 65% above its 200-day moving average when Burry made his call, a stretch he compared to conditions last seen during the dot-com era.

Days later, reports surfaced that Meta is building a business called Meta Compute to lease out its surplus AI data center capacity to outside customers, a move investors read as a signal that compute supply may be catching up with demand. On Thursday, July 2, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped more than 6%, its steepest single-day fall in recent memory, and the selloff spread to Samsung and SK Hynix in Asia, briefly triggering a circuit breaker on South Korea's Kospi. Memory and storage names took the hardest hits, with SanDisk sinking almost 20% over the past five sessions while Seagate and Micron also slid on fears of a supply glut as Samsung and SK Hynix ramp up new capacity, even as Micron's fiscal third-quarter revenue rose 346% year over year.

Tesla fell 7.5% that same Thursday, its worst single session in nearly a year, despite reporting Q2 deliveries of 480,126 vehicles, well above Wall Street's consensus estimate, with traders treating the beat as a sell-the-news event after the stock had run up more than 13% over the four prior sessions. None of the moves directly tie back to Burry's filings, since the chip selloff traces to Meta's compute-leasing plans and Tesla's drop lines up with a classic post-earnings pattern rather than any catalyst linked to the famed "Big Short" investor, whose original subprime mortgage crisis call dates to 2008. Still, Burry's basket touched nearly every name now under pressure, with Caterpillar, his other first-ever short, still trading at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 53, and the picture is likely to sharpen as Tesla's July 22 earnings and the next round of AI capex commentary land.