Michael Burry Of "The Big Short" Is Shorting Tesla

The Big Short Investor, Michael Burry has placed a bet against Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla. 

 If there's one thing Michael Burry is good at, it's placing bets. He's made billions off bets against mortgage securities in a financial crisis and has currently a placed an interesting one against Elon Musk’s Tesla.

On Monday, Michael Burry’s Scion Asset Management said in a regulatory filing that it had put a wager on 800,100 shares in Tesla as of the end of the first quarter. Going by Tesla’s closing price of $667.93 at the end of the first quarter, the value of 800,100 shares would be about $534m. This gives the company, Scion, rights to sell Tesla shares on or before an unidentified date in the future. 

After a long year in 2020, Telsa shares jumped to $883 in January 2021, going up nearly 700%. Despite this rise, the shares have slowly gone downhill, making analysts worried that it may have been overvalued in the first place. Shares of Tesla (TSLA) now trade at $563.46 on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

This isn't Burry's first bet against Musk's Tesla. In early December, he tweeted that his firm was shorting shares of the car company, and so advised Elon Musk to sell shares to raise capital. This was after the pandemic when stocks were still suffering from the after-effects of lockdown.

Tesla bounced back from that; recording profit in the first quarter - with their Bitcoin purchase and resale.

Currently, it is not known the exact time Michael Burry made the bet against Telsa or how much the firm paid for the shares. According to the filing, however, the value is around $534 million, which coincides with the value of Telsa's shares in March.