Michael Burry and Mark Cuban trade barbs over dot-com era fortunes

Burry, the investor famously portrayed in The Big Short, argued on X that stock prices lost all connection to business fundamentals between the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management and the peak of the dot-com crash in early 2000. He claimed that individuals with no real insight secured permanent wealth during that window, noting that he still hears from them regularly. While Burry avoided naming specific targets, Cuban—who famously sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999—leaned into the insult with a series of laughing emojis.

Beyond the name-calling, the two investors are circling a more serious disagreement regarding the current AI boom. Burry contends that current market participants are ignoring inflated valuations in favor of unsustainable hype, fearing that massive spending on microchips and data centers will eventually lead to obsolescence. Cuban, while acknowledging the volatility of bull markets, has expressed similar skepticism about the long-term utility of the infrastructure being built. He recently joked that many expensive data centers currently under construction might eventually be repurposed into pickleball courts once the efficiency gains of AI are fully realized.