Michael Burry

Michael Burry is a physician and investor who founded Scion Capital in 2000. Through meticulous analysis of mortgage bond prospectuses — reading thousands of pages of CDO documentation — he identified massive problems in subprime mortgage underwriting as early as 2005. He bought credit default swaps against subprime mortgage securities and profited enormously when the market collapsed. His story was documented in Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" and the subsequent film. After closing Scion to outside investors, he reopened as Scion Asset Management, continuing to invest in deep-value equities. Burry's post-crisis investing has been characterized by similarly contrarian positions — including a large bet against Tesla and positions in undervalued water rights and agricultural land companies — maintaining the deep, idiosyncratic research process that distinguished his pre-crisis analysis from consensus thinking.