Michael Burry has a bone to pick with Alex Karp.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame hit back at the Palantir CEO in an X post on Sunday night, after Karp blasted his latest bets as “batshit crazy” in a televised interview last week.
“Doesn’t surprise me one bit that Alex Karp and his ‘ontology’ @PalantirTech cannot crack a simple 13F,” Burry wrote.
“A fundamental principle of any rigorous ontological/epistemological model — whether philosophical or in data science — is recognizing when your information set is insufficient for valid conclusions,” he added.
Burry’s Scion Asset Management revealed last Monday, in a quarterly portfolio disclosure known as a 13F, that at the end of September, it owned bearish put options on 5 million Palantir shares with a notional value of $912 million.
The filing also showed it held puts on 1 million Nvidia shares worth a notional $187 million. But it didn’t indicate whether Burry held those short positions through October or early November.
The revelation on the same day as Palantir’s third-quarter earnings may have contributed to its stock falling 15% over the next three days, from a record $207 to $175, before ending the week at $178.
Karp called out Burry and others for betting against Palantir
On Tuesday morning last week, Karp took aim at Burry on CNBC. “As far as I can tell, the two companies he’s shorting are the ones making all the money, which is super weird — like the idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is batshit crazy,” he said.
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Ontology, the study of the nature of existence, is also the name of a core feature of Foundry, Palantir’s primary enterprise platform for commercial customers.
Karp said it was “super triggering” when short sellers “pick on” Palantir, as it’s doing “noble work” by enriching retail investors and supporting military personnel. But their efforts drive him and his team to work harder and “make them poorer,” he added.
The boss of the AI-powered data analysis and integration company suggested Burry may have lost money betting against Palantir, and had gone public with his short wager to push down its stock and recoup some of his losses.
Palantir’s revenue rose 63% year-on-year to about $1.2 billion last quarter, helping to more than triple its net income to $477 million. The software company projected its full-year revenues would be up about 54% this year at around $4.4 billion.
Its stock has surged roughly 28-fold since the start of 2023, from around $6 per share to $178. That has catapulted the company to a $422 billion market capitalization as of Friday’s close, making it more valuable than Costco, Bank of America, or AMD.
Scion and Palantir didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Burry signaled that he’s no longer short Palantir
13F filings only capture a snapshot of a firm’s US stock holdings on a single day each quarter, and are published with a six-week lag. They also exclude shares sold short, investments in private and foreign-listed companies, and non-stock assets such as bonds and real estate, meaning they may not paint a full picture of an investor’s strategy.
Burry shot to fame after his massive, contrarian bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble was featured in author Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short.” He was portrayed by actor Christian Bale in the movie adaptation.
His recent X posts suggest he’s closed out his bet against Palantir since the end of September.
“Fake news! I am not 5’6,” he posted the day after Scion’s filing and Palantir’s earnings, along with a photo of himself standing next to Bale, who’s around six feet tall. Burry’s cryptic message seemed to mean that he’s not short — physically or in financial terms.
Burry has also updated a tease in his X bio, suggesting he’ll shed light on his thinking on November 25 instead of in December.
The Scion boss returned to X after a two-year hiatus on October 30 with a coded warning that he believes the AI boom is a bubble, but the only “winning move” is to bet neither on nor against it.
He followed that up by posting “Star Wars” memes, charts, and book excerpts supporting the idea that the AI boom is an echo of the dot-com bubble, growth could stall, and surging capital investments could lead to an infrastructure glut.
