“Big Short” Investor Says Meta, Oracle Accounting Hiding "Brutal Truth" on AI

Michael Burry — the Big Short investor who famously predicted the 2008 housing collapse — broke a two-year silence this week to deliver another stark warning: that Big Tech’s AI-era profits are built on “one of the most common frauds in the modern era” — stretching or manipulating depreciation schedules, Eva Roytburg reported for Fortune.

Burry estimated that Big Tech will understate depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028. (Photo: Jonas Karlsson, Vanderbilt School of Medicine - Vanderbilt University)

The warning came with added weight. Earlier this week, Burry quietly deregistered his investing firm, Scion Asset Management, stepping away from managing outside money and from filing public disclosures.

Some analysts saw the move not as a red flag but as, in the words of Bruno Schneller, managing director at Erlen Capital Management, stepping away “from a game he believes is fundamentally rigged,” he told CNBC.

“On to much better things,” Burry hinted on X, where he is expected to announce a new launch on November 25. Free from reporting obligations and client management, Burry returned to X with a message that cut through the market’s AI euphoria.

To him, the boom in GPUs, data centers, and trillion-dollar AI bets is not proof of unstoppable growth; it is evidence of a financial cycle that is increasingly distorted, crowded, and fragile.

Burry put specific numbers to his warning. He estimated that Big Tech will understate depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028, inflating reported profits by 26.9% at Oracle and 20.8% at Meta — two of the companies he named directly.