'Big Short' investor Michael Burry questions Elon Musk's space ambitions — and pokes fun at GameStop's stock split
- Michael Burry suggested Elon Musk's grand ambitions in space could cost the SpaceX CEO everything.
- "The Big Short" investor questioned whether Musk would succeed in space or crash and burn.
Michael Burry suggested Elon Musk's extraterrestrial ambitions might be his downfall, and poked fun at GameStop's planned stock split, in a pair of now-deleted tweets on Wednesday.
Pride before the fall
"Spaceman or Icarus?" Burry tweeted on Wednesday, tagging Elon Musk in his post. "Not that there's anything wrong with Icarus," he added, linking to a YouTube video of Iron Maiden performing a song called "Flight of Icarus."
Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, a spacecraft manufacturer, and has publicly stated he wants to colonize Mars during his lifetime. The story of Icarus is a cautionary tale from Greek mythology, about a young man who takes flight on wax wings. His hubris spurs him to fly too close to the Sun, causing his wings to melt, and he plummets to his death.
Burry's tweet raised the prospect that Musk's arrogance might be his undoing, and the world's richest man could lose everything in his pursuit of interstellar travel. The investor also took a veiled jab at Musk on Thursday, after Insider broke the news that Musk fathered twins with a subordinate at SpaceX.
The Scion Asset Management chief has taken aim at Musk and Tesla before. He has ridiculed the electric-vehicle company's valuation, and bet against its stock. He also accused Musk of selling Tesla shares last year because he needed cash to pay off his personal debts, and wanted to capitalize on his company's overvaluation.
"Burry is a broken clock," Musk responded to the latter claim, referring to Burry's frequent warnings about asset bubbles and market crashes.
Playing the market
"GME should have announced a 40:1 split for old time's sake," Burry tweeted after GameStop's board on Wednesday approved a four-for-one stock split, scheduled for later in July.
The investor of "The Big Short" fame is likely skeptical about the upcoming split, which promises to lower GameStop's stock price and make it more accessible to retail investors. Burry has warned meme stocks will inevitably crash, and GameStop shares are still up about 500% since the start of 2021.
Burry's tweet nods to the short squeeze on GameStop shares in January 2021, which sent the video-game retailer's stock price up as much as 2,500%, from $19 to $483 at its peak.
The investor inadvertently helped to spark that episode, and the meme-stock mania that followed, by purchasing a stake in GameStop, and flagging the huge short interest in its shares in letters to the company's bosses.
However, Burry balked when GameStop's stock exploded upward; he labeled the saga "unnatural, insane, and dangerous," and advised those who scored huge gains on the stock to cash out.
The Scion boss later described the GameStop saga as a "uniquely perfect setup," and likened it to his iconic wager against the mid-2000s housing bubble, which was chronicled in the book and the movie, "The Big Short."
