Michael Burry’s bet against Tesla is up roughly 25.8% in under four weeks, after Thursday’s post-earnings rout erased about $204 billion of the company’s market value in a single session.
The decline marked one of the largest one-day losses in its history and extended into Friday morning.
Tesla traded at $308.97 at 10:42 a.m. ET, down 3.4% on the day.
Thursday’s close of $319.69, down from $374.01 on Wednesday, marked a 14.5% single-day fall that cut the company’s capitalization to $1.16 trillion by Friday morning.
The short position of the “Big Short” investor was disclosed on June 30.
The Short Position
Burry revealed the trade in his paid Substack newsletter, writing that he had shorted Tesla at $416.22 and adding that he was happy the stock had “jumped back to this level.”
Against Friday morning’s price, the entry shows a gain of about 25.8%, with no position size ever disclosed — the short was the last name in a five-stock basket opened the same day against stretched AI and chip valuations.
The other stocks include Caterpillar at $1,060.98, Nvidia at $198.09, the SOXX semiconductor ETF at $642.80 and Applied Materials at $729.40, with Tesla listed last at $416.22.
Nvidia traded above $207 on Thursday, leaving that short underwater even as the Tesla position carries the basket.
Tesla committed to more than $25 billion of capital spending this year on Wednesday’s call, the AI-infrastructure buildout Burry has spent months attacking as under-depreciated across the industry, and seven firms cut price targets the next day.
Piper Sandler made it eight Wall Street target cuts inside 24 hours on Friday, trimming to $450 from $500 while keeping an Overweight rating — the most constructive reduction of the group, and one that still sits 45.6% above where the stock traded at press time.
Burry called Tesla “ridiculously overvalued” in December, estimating the company dilutes shareholders about 3.6% a year, and mocked what he termed the Elon cult for rotating from electric cars to autonomy to robots as competition arrived in each.
Even after Thursday, the stock trades at 287 times trailing earnings.
The SpaceX Take
Burry circled Elon Musk’s second listed company in June and walked away.
SpaceX shares set an all-time low of $110.85 on Thursday after the $75 billion raise in the largest IPO on record.
The stock traded at $111.72 on Friday morning, down 5.5% on the day, 17.2% below the $135 price of June’s initial public offering and 50.9% below the all-time high reached days after listing.
On June 16, with the stock near $212, Burry published SpaceX put prices and declined them all — “Tempted by that one. But no thank you,” he wrote of a December 2026 contract priced around $6.75.
The “Big Short” describes the company as fundamentally a small space business joined to a niche telecom, a struggling social platform, and a scaled-down CoreWeave, carrying a $2.8 trillion valuation on under $20 billion of revenue.
His stated hope that the shares would stabilize in the mid-$200s and drain volatility from the options market went unfulfilled in the most emphatic way available.
However, the stock has roughly halved since then.
The slide also erodes a line on Tesla‘s own books — the $1.01 billion unrealized gain on its SpaceX stake disclosed this week was marked when the shares stood far higher, and shrinks with every session like this one.
As for the puts he passed on: they carry strikes near $100, so they remain out of the money even now — but their market value has multiplied as the stock collapsed toward the strike, meaning the trade he judged too expensive would have paid handsomely on a mark-to-market basis.
The Silence on the Other Side
Musk has said nothing about Burry’s short in the three and a half weeks since disclosure.
In November 2021, Burry posted that Musk had borrowed against 88.3 million of his shares and was selling for personal reasons: “He doesn’t need cash. He just wants to sell $TSLA,” he wrote, pointing in a follow-up to Musk’s own earlier claim that the stock price was too high.
“Burry is a broken clock,” Musk replied within hours, in a post still live on X — after which Burry deleted the tweet, and days later his entire account.
Nothing comparable has followed the June 30 short, the December valuation attack or the SpaceX critique.
In January, Burry offered his fullest verdict on the man whose companies he keeps circling: an American treasure, he wrote, who “will go down in history like PT Barnum and Thomas Edison” — and a desperately incentivized futurist whose self-evident futures with indefinite timelines raise capital.
Three weeks later, the two listed companies are worth about $460 billion less than when the month began.
