Michael Burry is ‘tempted’ to short Elon Musk’s SpaceX, but says it’s not enticing enough for ‘fundamentally a small space company’
Famed investor Michael Burry—of “The Big Short” fame—considered antagonizing the richest man on the planet over the IPO of his latest company.Burry said he had been tempted to bet against Space X, the rocket company owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.Space X went public last week and its stock has already gained more than 25%. The company’s valuation since then has soared close to $3 trillion, even overtaking Jeff Bezos’s Amazon at one point. But for every optimist backing Musk’s bid to establish a human colony on Mars is an investor on Earth wondering if the plan will ever take off. Burry, in typical form, was open in asking that question. In a Substack post, the analyst best known for predicting the housing crash before the 2008 financial crisis said he had reviewed a number of trading options for betting against Musk’s company. “I am not involved with SpaceX now. Neither short nor, ahem, long,” Burry wrote Tuesday, per CNBC. Put options on the shorter end—expiring in June 2027 for example—cost roughly $13 with the stock trading at around $212, Burry reported. A put ending December 2026 was priced at around $6.75, he added. Burry was “tempted by that one. But no thank you,” he wrote of the short option. He isn’t sold on the eye-watering valuation of Musk’s latest venture, which he described as “fundamentally a small space company, a niche telecom, a bedeviled social media company, and a Coreweave-light.” Investors did get a chance to peek at the company’s financials ahead of its IPO in the form of an S-1 filing, which revealed that while revenue is up, so too are losses. As Fortune previously reported, Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) is growing at a steady clip—full-year revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025 increased roughly 33% from $14.1 billion in 2024—but its losses are also accelerating. As of March 31, SpaceX has racked up an “accumulated deficit” of $41.3 billion, with a $4.27 billion net loss in Q1 of