Michael Burry: SpaceX's $3 Trillion Tag Doesn't Add Up
Michael Burry calls SpaceX 'a small space company' priced near $3 trillion, and explains why he is tempted but still won't short the record IPO.
The Big Short's Author Picks a New Target
Michael Burry has trained his sights on the largest IPO ever written — and he is not impressed. Fresh off raising roughly $75 billion by selling more than 555 million shares at $135 apiece, SpaceX now carries a market value of nearly $3 trillion. Burry's verdict is blunt: this is "fundamentally a small space company," one that still generates less than $20 billion in annual revenue.
The Math That Stings
To frame the gap, Burry runs the numbers. That $2.8 trillion in market cap, he notes, could buy out Page, Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Arnault, Huang, Buffett and Ortega — combined — and still leave $1 trillion on the table. A company with revenue thinner than plenty of S&P 500 laggards is priced above the largest private fortunes on earth. That chasm between narrative and fundamentals is exactly the terrain Burry has hunted for two decades.
Why He Still Won't Short It
The tell is what Burry isn't doing. He holds no position — "neither short nor, ahem, long." He looked at $100-strike puts: the December 2028 contract trades near $25, June 2027 around $13, and December 2026 about $6.75. "Tempted by that one. But no thank you," he said of the near-dated put. The hedge against the hype is simply too expensive — the familiar trap of crowded, richly valued names, where being right and getting paid are two different things.
The Trade Read
Burry figures the stock will, "with any luck," settle somewhere in the mid-$200s — not a crash from the $135 offer, but a hard reset of the debut euphoria. And SpaceX is bigger than a single ticker. The record listing sets the benchmark for the entire IPO pipeline, with OpenAI and others queued behind it. If SpaceX re-rates lower, it cools sentiment across the expensive megacap and new-issue trades that have carried the tape. The takeaway is sober: a valuation that tops whole rows of billionaires eventually needs the revenue to match.