Michael Burry

Burry is a pure fundamental analyst. He reads the actual documents.

Not the analyst summary. Not the ratings agency report.

The actual prospectus, the loan files, the footnotes. For the Big Short trade, he read thousands of individual mortgage loan documents.

Nobody else was doing that. Analysts were looking at aggregate statistics.

The aggregate statistics looked fine. The individual loans were a disaster.

His basic method: find something everyone is ignoring, do the work to understand why it''s mispriced, take a position, and wait. The waiting is the hard part.

He was short the housing market for two years before it collapsed. During those two years his investors were losing money on paper and threatening legal action.

He locked redemptions to prevent forced liquidation. He was right and it cost him two years of misery to prove it.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson invests in crypto the way a founder would, not a spreadsheet jockey. She hunts for the technology that developers actually want to build on.

Then she bets big and holds through the wild swings. She is comfortable being early.

She is comfortable looking wrong for a while. As she puts it, the job is to follow where the best entrepreneurs are already going, not to sit in a room and decide what should be interesting.

In plain English, she buys the picks and shovels of crypto and waits years.

Michael Burry

Read the documents. That is basically the whole philosophy.

Not the summary. Not the analyst report.

The actual documents. Most investors don''t do this because it''s tedious and slow and it requires a tolerance for complexity that most people don''t want to develop.

His second rule: be willing to be lonely. His housing short was a deeply contrarian position that most finance professionals thought was ridiculous.

He didn''t need their validation. He needed the math to work.

His third: factor in time when sizing a position. The housing market stayed wrong for two years.

Size your position so you can survive being right too early.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson's core belief is that crypto matters most where money is broken. She points back to Zimbabwe.

When your currency loses value by the hour, a network no government controls stops being a toy and becomes a lifeline. She bets on that idea over decades, not quarters.

She also backs builders over hype. The projects that survive are the ones developers keep showing up to work on, bull market or bear market.

Her best investments, she says, are the ones where the founder's thinking is further ahead than her own.

Michael Burry

He concentrates heavily. When he has a thesis, he puts a large portion of the fund into it.

He also used leverage on the housing trade — borrowing to buy credit default swaps amplified both the wait and the eventual payoff. His risk tolerance is high in the sense that he can hold a losing position for years if the fundamental analysis is intact.

It is low in the sense that he won''t touch anything he doesn''t deeply understand. He doesn''t trade momentum or narratives.

If the math doesn''t work, he''s not interested.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson is built for crypto's stomach-churning drops. She thinks in decades, not weeks, so an 80% crash reads as noise rather than an emergency.

She proved it the hard way. Autonomous Partners was investing right as the 2018 crypto winter hit, and she kept going.

Her funds are designed to be 10-year-plus funds on purpose. The whole point is to hold long enough that short-term panic stops mattering.

Michael Burry

He lives in Saratoga, California. He is notoriously private — he has opened and deleted social media accounts multiple times after his market commentary attracted more attention than he wanted.

He occasionally posts about market risks and then goes quiet for months. He has a son with Asperger''s syndrome, and the experience led him to recognise similar traits in himself and pursue his own autism diagnosis as an adult.

He doesn''t do conferences. He doesn''t do interviews.

He files his quarterly 13F and lets the positions speak.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson keeps her personal life almost entirely offline, which is rare for someone this visible in crypto. What is public is how she handles the asset itself.

She is a holder, not a day trader. She has said the firm's funds are built to run for a decade or more, and she invests her attention the same way.

For someone whose whole job is digital assets, she treats them less like a casino and more like seeds planted for a long harvest.

Michael Burry

The housing trade. In 2005, Burry read thousands of subprime mortgage loan documents and concluded the US housing market was built on loans that would eventually default in large numbers.

He persuaded Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to sell him credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities — essentially insurance that paid out when the mortgages defaulted. The banks thought he was wrong.

They were happy to take his premiums. In 2007–2008 the mortgages defaulted.

His investors made $700 million. Burry personally made about $100 million.

The banks that sold him the swaps needed government bailouts to survive.

Arianna Simpson

Phantom. Simpson got in early on the crypto wallet, and a16z crypto backed it when it was a small team building on Solana.

Phantom raised $150 million in January 2025 at a $3 billion valuation. Her other headline deal was a wild ride.

She led the $152 million round in Sky Mavis, the maker of Axie Infinity, in October 2021 and joined its board. Months later the game's Ronin bridge was hacked for about $600 million and the token collapsed.

Phantom is the win. Axie is the reminder that crypto giveth and taketh away.

Michael Burry

The trade nearly destroyed him before it paid off. He locked investor redemptions to prevent forced liquidation of his position — probably the right call, but it created a legal and emotional nightmare that he''s described as one of the worst periods of his life.

He also closed Scion to outside investors after winning, which in hindsight was leaving behind an institutional money management career after one of the greatest trades in history. He''s never explained that decision fully.

It may have been the right one. It may not have been.

Arianna Simpson

Timing. Autonomous Partners launched in late 2017, right at the peak of the crypto mania.

Within months the market fell off a cliff. Bitcoin dropped from nearly $20,000 to around $3,000 by the end of 2018.

Being early is one thing. Being early and then watching the entire market crater tests everyone.

The rough entry taught her a lesson she now lives by. Conviction only pays if you can survive long enough to be proven right.

Michael Burry

Michael Burry was born in San Jose, California in 1971. He lost his left eye to retinoblastoma as a child and has worn a prosthetic eye since.

He studied economics at UCLA and then went to Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. During his medical residency at Stanford, he posted detailed stock analysis on investor message boards between midnight and 3 AM.

The quality was consistently good enough that people in finance started paying attention.

He left his residency in 2000 — one year from finishing — to start Scion Capital with $1.1 million in loans from his family. No finance credentials.

Just a public track record and conviction. In his first full year, the S&P 500 fell 11.9%.

Scion returned 55%. From 2001 to 2008, Scion returned over 489% against the S&P 500's 3%.

Then he made the trade.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson grew up in Milan and studied international politics at Penn State. Her turning point came in Zimbabwe in 2013.

She saw firsthand what happens when a currency loses value by the hour. That got her hooked on the idea of money no government can print at will.

She quit her job at Facebook and joined BitGo, a company that guards crypto for big institutions. In 2015 she helped start Crystal Towers Capital, backing young Y Combinator startups.

In 2017 she launched her own crypto fund, Autonomous Partners. She raised it from serious names, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and David Sacks' Craft Ventures.

In 2020 she joined a16z crypto as a deal partner and was later made a general partner.

Michael Burry

Scion Capital ran from 2000 to 2008. He closed it to outside investors after the Big Short trade — partly because managing money for clients who were screaming at him to reverse a position he knew was right was a genuinely miserable experience, and partly because he didn't need to anymore.

He relaunched as Scion Asset Management, a personal vehicle he still runs today. His current investing is more conventional — value picks, occasional activist positions, portfolio bets that get attention when his 13F filings come out.

He bought GameStop before Reddit did. He shorted Tesla.

He has positioned in water rights and farmland. He tends to be early, which is both his gift and his problem.

Arianna Simpson

Autonomous Partners was her own show. She started it in 2017 and used it to back crypto projects like Talos, a trading platform, and Mythical Games, a blockchain gaming studio.

At a16z crypto she now helps run one of the largest crypto funds on earth, more than $7 billion across several funds. Her best-known bets there are Phantom, the crypto wallet, and Blackbird, the dining rewards startup from Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal.

She also sits on the board of Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie Infinity. Before all of this she worked at BitGo and Facebook.

Michael Burry

BA in Economics, UCLA. MD, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, 1999.

He completed three years of his medical residency at Stanford before leaving to start Scion Capital. He is technically a licensed physician who never practiced.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson went to Penn State, in the Schreyer Honors College. She earned dual degrees in international politics and Spanish.

Not a computer science degree. Not an MBA.

Her real education in money came later, on the ground in Zimbabwe in 2013, watching inflation do its damage in real time.