The Man Who Predicted the 2008 Housing Crisis is Betting Against Palantir. Should You Be Worried?

Good morning guys!

In my last post, I talked about reading between the lines when scary headlines hit the market, specifically about Claude Mythos displacing cybersecurity companies.

Today’s post is similar.

Because right around the same time, another headline dropped that I know rattled a lot of you.

Michael Burry is shorting Palantir, citing that Anthropic is eating their lunch.

If you’re not familiar, “shorting” means betting that a stock’s price will go down.

And if you took anything away from the last post, it’s this: your first instinct as an investor should never be to panic, and to dig deeper instead.

So before I get into what I found, let me give you some background on who Michael Burry actually is.

If you’ve watched The Big Short (yes an actual movie about him), you already know the story.

Burry is the guy who saw the 2008 housing collapse coming before almost anyone else. He shorted mortgage-backed securities when the whole world thought he was insane. He was right. His fund returned nearly 490% between 2000 and 2008. He made history.

That one trade made him a legend.

And that legend is exactly what the media uses every single time he makes a new prediction.

So when Burry says something is going to crash, the headline practically writes itself. The implication is always the same: this man predicted 2008, so maybe he’s right again.

Burry’s argument on why he’s betting against Palantir is simple.

The valuation is stretched, the AI hype has inflated the stock beyond what the business justifies.

And honestly? His valuation point has some logic to it. Palantir is not cheap by any traditional measure.

But expensive and broken are two very different things.

Here’s what most people miss about Palantir.

They don’t just sell software. They embed their systems so deeply into workflows and data that replacing them means starting from scratch. Most organisations never bother.

Then add the government layer. Military contracts. Intelligence agencies. Active combat operations. A $10 billion Army enterprise agreement signed in 2025 alone. These aren’t deals you win overnight, and they’re not deals you lose overnight either. The security clearances, the compliance reviews, the years of trust built inside classified environments. That is a moat most companies can only dream of.

And just yesterday (Apr 22), they announced a $300 million deal with the USDA, which will use the company’s software in farmland management.

But you know what’s the kicker? Their first USDA contract back in 2022 was worth $2.2 million.

What does it tell you about the value they deliver, for a customer to grow their contract 150 times over?

And then on April 10, while Burry was doubling down on his short, Trump posted the above. The FIRST TIME a sitting president included a specific stock ticker symbol in a public post (wild times we live in).

Think about what that tells you about how deeply embedded this company is.

Burry may be right that the price is stretched. But the business itself is genuinely hard to displace. And for long-term investors, that distinction matters more than any short-seller’s thesis.

Now if you think this was his first bearish call since the 2008 housing crisis, it isn’t.

Let's look at what his track record actually says.

I went and dug this up. And it makes for an interesting read.

The image says it all.

One analyst tracked his major calls between 2017 and 2023. The conclusion: roughly 71% of them turned out to be wrong.

Now look. I’m not saying this to mock the man. He is genuinely brilliant. His analytical framework is sharp. He spots real vulnerabilities in markets that most people miss.

But spotting a vulnerability and timing the market correctly are two completely different things.

After investing for over a decade, this is one market pattern that I keep seeing.

A big name makes a bearish call. The media amplifies it with the 2008 reference. Retail investors panic and sell. And then the market, more often than not, keeps moving in the other direction.

The lesson isn’t that Burry is always wrong.

Burry can afford to be wrong for years and still come out fine. He has the capital and the structure for it.

Most of us don’t have that kind of luxury. We gotta play a different one that gives us a higher probability of winning.

That game is quality.

When you sell in panic, you lock in the loss permanently.

When you hold firm, you stay in the game long enough for the business to prove itself.

Discipline is the primary driver of long-term wealth.

Not intelligence. Not prediction. Discipline.

Till the next post, ciao!

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