Jul 16, 2026
Michael Burry’s latest move has become a big success — but it’s not a stock pick, exactly. It’s a newsletter, and it could be netting him millions.
Burry, the investor who became famous for The Big Short, the 2015 film that tells the story of how he predicted the subprime mortgage crisis, has been writing his Cassandra Unchained newsletter on the platform Substack since November 2025.
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Burry revealed in a recent post that he’s passed the milestone of 300,000 subscribers.
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“Less than eight months into this new and intense adventure that is Cassandra Unchained, I am stunned and humbled by the unique, thoroughly enjoyable community of awesome people we have all created at CU,” Burry wrote.
The internet was quick to focus on another aspect of this milestone, however: how much money Burry could be making from his newsletter.
Making millions?
In November 2025, Burry deregistered his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, with the SEC, and launched his newsletter. The newsletter was a vehicle to “lay out in detail his increasingly bearish thesis on artificial intelligence,” a CNBC report said at the time.
According to StockTwits, the Substack quickly gained more than 60,000 subscribers, as Burry posted his “first AI-focused essays and intensified his criticism of Nvidia Corp. over stock-based compensation, hyperscaler spending and accounting practices.”
He has made trade disclosures including bearish positions on Nvidia, Palantir, Applied Materials, the iShares Semiconductor ETF and Tesla, StockTwits reported.
As Burry shared the news that he had hit 300,000 subscribers, there was speculation as to how much money the newsletter venture was making.
Subscriptions to Cassandra Unchained go for a hefty $39 a month, $379 per year, but it also has a free tier, and subscriber numbers include those who read for free.
Although Substack does not disclose numbers of paid subscribers, Cassandra Unchained does have a purple Substack “Bestseller badge,” which indicates tens of thousands of paid subscribers. It’s also ranked No. 2 in Substack’s finance category.
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StockTwits noted that, theoretically, if all 300,000 of Burry’s subscribers were paid subscribers, it would mean $113.7 million annually, not including any fees Substack may charge.
In its report on Burry’s milestone, The Street was more conservative, noting that the true number of subscribers was ‘unknowable from the outside” and “a fraction of the fantasy.”
However, The Street noted that the income from the newsletter was more steady than his trades, which “swing hard.”
“His current Nvidia and Palantir shorts have lurched from losing to winning and back,” The Street noted, while the newsletter “bills on the first of the month whether the market agrees with him or not.”
A report on Burry’s newsletter from Fintech Growth Insider from back in December, when the newsletter had already gained 120,000 subscribers, noted that if just 5% of those 120,000 paid the subscription, it could “generate over $2.8 million annually, almost as much as the $3.1 million he could have generated in management [fees] on the $155 [million] Scion had under management (assuming a 2% management fee).”
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Who’s reading?
The Street described the $379 annual subscription as buying “a front-row seat to a brilliant, deeply bearish mind” but cautioned that it did not buy certainty.
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“Burry has been early for years, flat wrong for stretches, and vindicated just often enough to keep everyone paying attention. Subscribing is closer to buying a season ticket than buying an edge,” the report from The Street says.
Of course, it’s possible that the portion of Burry’s 300,000-ish subscribers who are paying for the upgraded subscription are doing so purely for entertainment, and not for advice on their portfolios — but it’s unlikely.
It’s also possible that a portion of those paid subscribers aren’t just DIY investors, but actually financial influencers, or even would-be gurus, themselves.
Perhaps they’re paying the subscription fee to turn around and make their own paid commentary about Burry’s paid commentary. And then other “finfluencers” are paying for that content, and repackaging it as their own, passing it down the line.
It sounds like an unlikely scenario, though, something out of a Hollywood movie.
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Rebecca Payne has more than a decade of experience editing and producing both local and national daily newspapers. She's worked on the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Metro, Canada's National Observer, the Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press.
