Michael Burry is back to short selling.
The investor who bet against the U.S. housing market to become one of Wall Street’s most renowned contrarians will serve as a senior adviser to Minerva Investment Management as the business prepares to establish a short-biased investment vehicle.
The decision comes less than a year after Burry liquidated Scion Asset Management, the hedge fund where he handled his assets.
Scion’s regulatory registration was terminated in November 2025, Reuters confirmed. The firm had managed about $155 million as of March of that year.
Later, Burry moved most of his public market analysis inside his paid “Cassandra Unchained” newsletter.
But he hasn’t become any less gloomy.
His latest criticism has centered on the artificial intelligence boom, as Reuters noted, particularly Nvidia (NVDA) and Palantir Technologies (PLTR), as well as the depreciation assumptions used by tech firms that invest substantially in AI infrastructure.
Now Burry is clinging to an investment business focused on uncovering downside. And it’s not as if he just decided to go back to it; Minerva was created in response to that demand.
The team behind it claims institutional investors have been clamoring for something along those lines for months.
Michael Burry joins a fund built around short selling
Burry will join Lakshmi Ganapathi and the team at Unicus Research as Minerva develops the new fund.
He is senior adviser, which is a major change from managing the portfolio personally. Burry described his involvement as having a “front row seat” as Ganapathi and her team move into short-biased investment management.
Ganapathi said Unicus has been building its research business for more than seven years, with institutional customers in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia, and the Middle East.
In the past year, the firm has begun receiving requests from investors and allocators to not only provide research but also manage capital against its ideas.
The move modified the equation.
Ganapathi said many institutional investors have shown interest in the fund, which the company confirmed it was launching that month.
In fact, the foundation had been laid before Burry arrived. In April, Ganapathi told Institutional Investor that the business has established a dedicated short fund due to ongoing demand from institutional investors and family offices.
The logic was pragmatic. Some customers wanted to be bearish but didn’t want to have to deal with the intricacies of individual short positions themselves.
That makes Burry’s entry more than a celebrity investor putting his name on a newfangled product.
Minerva was already transitioning to short exposure control, and that approach now has one of the most prominent short-selling names attached to it.
Michael Burry’s AI criticism fits his new role
Burry’s entry also comes as he has switched his focus more to the artificial intelligence sector.
His critique goes beyond the fact that AI stocks have soared too high.
One of his main reasons is depreciation. Tech firms have poured billions of dollars into servers, processors, and other processing infrastructure needed to develop and run standard artificial intelligence systems.
More AI:
- Nvidia just made a move Wall Street wasn’t ready for
- Microsoft just took sides in the AI policy fight
- OpenAI just disclosed something genuinely alarming
Companies don’t typically expense all those assets at once; the costs are depreciated over their expected useful lives.
The longer the estimated useful life, the less the annual depreciation charge may be. Burry has therefore claimed that prolonging depreciation schedules for fast-moving computer equipment may make earnings appear better than they would otherwise.
The argument has now broadened beyond one corporation.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft have increased capital spending, while extending the assumed useful lives of some assets, since 2020. The accounting practices are legal, but rapid technological change has raised questions about whether some equipment may become economically obsolete sooner than accounting schedules assume.
Some of Burry’s sharpest suspicions have been aimed at Nvidia and Palantir. That puts him on the other side of two corporations strongly linked to the frenzy over artificial intelligence.
Minerva isn’t an anti-AI fund. Its opportunity set is much broader.
Unicus has conducted unfavorable analyses of firms in sectors ranging from electric autos and secondhand cars to cloud computing, biotechnology, and financial services.
The common denominator is not an industry. It’s looking for companies whose expectations, accounting, valuation, or fundamentals might be an opportunity to the downside.
That’s a lot more like the investment lens that made Burry famous in the first place.
Unicus has spent years looking for stocks to bet against
Burry also gets a ready-made short-research operation to run from Minerva.
Ganapathi and her husband, Robert MacArthur, are the husband-and-wife partnership behind Unicus and have decades of combined short-selling expertise.
MacArthur started off with short-selling methods in the 1990s and launched Alternative Research Service in 2005. Ganapathi had previously worked at the business before launching Unicus Research.
Unicus has conducted research on firms such as Faraday Future (FFAI), Carvana (CVNA), Snowflake (SNOW), Moderna (MRNA) and Robinhood (HOOD).
One difference is essential: Unicus is a research service that does not trade in those public equities.
That point was significant enough that Reuters corrected its original article to clarify the difference.
The investment-management vehicle is Minerva, and Unicus provides the research infrastructure.
The firm’s strategy includes some remarkable constraints. Earlier this year, Ganapathi said the team steers clear of certain sectors where it sees short-sellers taking on risks that are too difficult to quantify. She said the strategy avoids areas such as biotechnology, biopharmaceutical companies, and private credit.
The team also doesn’t touch shorting companies with cult-like followings among investors and has no plans to undertake activist short selling, she added.
These limits are important because short selling has a fundamentally different risk profile than purchasing equities.
If a stock drops to $0, a long investor may lose, at most, the amount invested. But a short seller may, in theory, lose a limitless amount of money, as a stock might climb forever.
A stock may be overpriced longer than a bearish investor can remain solvent. That makes position size, timing, and risk management all the more crucial, even if the underlying fundamental argument ultimately proves true.
One of the most prominent instances from Wall Street is Burry’s own career.
Michael Burry’s return comes after closing Scion
Burry had made his name by seeing danger ahead of the rest of the market.
He spotted the flaws in mortgage securities connected to the U.S. housing bubble before the 2008 financial crisis and positioned his fund to benefit from a collapse.
While that transaction eventually made him famous, the road to get there was anything but simple.
His negative housing thesis took a while to play out, showing one of the basic challenges of short-selling: Being correct about the underlying issue doesn’t always immediately translate into the market recognizing it.
His Minerva function has significant symbolic weight in light of that history.
But this isn’t just a rehash of Scion. Burry is not being named as Minerva’s portfolio manager, and the relevant disclosures do not offer a fund size, fee structure, or full portfolio.
Meanwhile, Minerva was spun out of Unicus’ existing short-research business in response to demand from institutional investors seeking managed bearish exposure.
Still, the timing makes the move particularly noteworthy. Earlier in the year, Scion had more than $155 million under management, and in November 2025, it filed to cancel its SEC registration. Burry then signaled he was on to other things and began to express his thoughts through Cassandra Unchained.
Less than a year later, he’s back with a professional investing business. And he is coming back via the side of the market most strongly connected with his name.
Michael Burry must strike a delicate Wall Street balance
Short selling has always involved more than just locating an overpriced stock.
The investor needs to figure out what may alter the market’s mindset, ride through potentially explosive rallies, and handle the risk that a firm continues to beat expectations. These problems worsen when you bet against hot growth companies.
Burry’s recent AI pessimism is an example of the issue. Nvidia and Palantir are tied to a technological investment cycle that has drawn massive sums of corporate expenditure and investors’ interest.
Even if a bearish investor believes expectations have become excessive, that doesn’t determine when or whether the market will agree.
So Minerva is moving into a strategy where risk management becomes as important as finding companies that look vulnerable.
The fund’s staff has been working on that move independently of Burry. Ganapathi stated that institutional investors and family offices had been pushing Unicus toward managed short exposure for months before Burry’s position became known, according to Institutional Investor.
Burry said the endeavor now has a new profile. He arrives with a past indelibly linked to one of the most famous negative bets in contemporary financial markets and a new set of worries about AI valuations and accounting.
But the new arrangement also marks a different chapter. Burry closed Scion. He moved much of his public commentary to Cassandra Unchained.
Now he is returning as an adviser rather than rebuilding his old hedge-fund structure. Although the vehicle is different, the underlying question is familiar.
Burry made his reputation looking for weaknesses hiding beneath some of Wall Street’s strongest narratives. Minerva is giving him a new vantage point to find the next one.
Related: Michael Burry reveals his verdict on the ongoing AI bubble
