FOIAengine: “Cassandra Unchained” Plays to Fear and Greed
Michael Burry, the reclusive contrarian who foresaw the 2007 subprime collapse and became the reluctant hero of The Big Short, has walked away from professional money management for the second — and perhaps final — time.
This month, after trumpeting a highly publicized billion-dollar bet against two market rock stars, Nvidia and Palantir, Burry abruptly shuttered his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management. The prolific prophet of crashes and recessions re-emerged not with a new fund or another market-defying bet, but with something far more predictable and arguably more lucrative: a subscription newsletter.
Burry’s new venture, Cassandra Unchained, already boasts more than 126,000 subscribers, a following large enough that he now may earn more from writing about his doomsday scenarios than trading on them.
Of course, there’s also a Freedom of Information Act angle to this story. We’ll get to that.
The math for Burry’s new market play is as arresting as his market calls. At Cassandra Unchained’s top subscription tier — $379 a year — Burry’s audience would generate over $48 million in annual revenue, a figure that rivals the management fees of mid-sized hedge funds, without the regulatory burden, capital constraints, or existential career risk that defined his years in the trenches.
Even if a portion of his subscribers pay a discounted rate, the newsletter still looks like one of the most profitable reinventions in modern finance. For a man whose genius has always depended on solitude and long stretches of uninterrupted research, the economics of publishing may be the ultimate asymmetric bet.
Burry has long struggled with the obligations that accompany managing other people’s money. His original fund, Scion Capital, produced extraordinary returns — nearly 500 percent (after fees) between 2000 and 2008. The S&P 500 gained a mere 3 percent during the same stretch. But Burry shut it down at the peak of his fame, exhausted by investor pressure during the early, deeply unpopular period of his subprime short.
The rebooted Scion Asset Management followed a similar trajectory: idiosyncratic positions, relentless skepticism of market leaders, and predictions of a stock-market bubble that never burst.
Burry’s last big play was against Nvidia and Palantir – an options bet with a notional value of $1.1 billion. He compared the high-flying AI stocks to the dot-com bubble of 2000. Today, as then, Burry argued, the tech infrastructure is overbuilt, with investment in AI far outstripping near-term demand.
It was another doomsday scenario, and the market largely shrugged it off. Burry – a fully credentialed Stanford M.D. who quit his residency and redirected his clinical mind toward the pathology of financial markets – had diagnosed the next bubble, but no one wanted to quit the party. “Sometimes, we see bubbles,” Burry posted the day before Halloween. “Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” Game-theory aficionados recognized the quote from the 1983 movie War Games. Eleven days later, a regulatory filing revealed Burry had made his next move. He shut down Scion Asset Management. Two weeks after that, he launched the newsletter.
Cassandra Unchained requires no filings, no 13F disclosures, no investor redemptions, and no impatient limited partners questioning his timing. Burry can deliver the same barbed macro commentary — and the same forensic analysis of market excess — that once rattled Wall Street, but now directly to an audience that pays to hear him. In a way, Cassandra Unchained completes the arc he began two decades ago on online message boards: a solitary investor with a cult readership, only now with a business model to match his influence.
True to his reputation as a recluse, Burry has never been a conventional user of social media. Instead, he’s used it calculatingly, to intensify the mystique – posting, then often deleting, the blasts he sends to 1.6 million followers. On X, there’s an account that’s solely devoted to archiving those deleted posts. That one has 244,000 followers, and in some ways it’s more revealing than his main account. It’s fascinating to see the predicted recessions that never happened.
Aside from his X posts, the only reliable window into his thinking now is his paid newsletter, Cassandra Unchained.
We looked into PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, to see whether past FOIA requests might provide more clues to the enigmatic Burry’s future moves.
Not surprisingly, Burry hadn’t left a FOIA footprint. But the person he designated as his replacement at Scion Asset Management did, in fact, show up.
When Burry shut down Scion Asset Management, he announced in a letter to investors that whatever remained of the organization would be passed along to his protégé, Phil Clifton, who started out with Scion as a summer intern in 2020 and returned to the company in 2021 after receiving his aerospace engineering degree at Georgia Tech.
Clifton started a new firm, Pomerium Capital – “currently under development,” no regulatory filings yet – after Scion shut down. On Substack this week, Burry called Clifton “my right-hand man at Scion the last four years . . . and he is quite literally a rocket scientist. Engineers make great analysts in my experience.”
It turns out Clifton made some interesting FOIA requests while he was working for Burry. In April 2024, he sought to learn more about the leak of Consumer Price Index data to Wall Street “super users” who had an inside track with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (See our story, “Forensic FOIA: BLS Users Are a Case Study.”)
Last June, Clifton made a detailed request to the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to learn more about a planned meeting of the Federal Housing Finance Oversight Board that included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. The meeting was widely believed to be a prelude to the potential reprivatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and there was an obvious connection to Burry. Both government-sponsored enterprises have been in federal receivership since the Big Short.
If that request was understandable, given Scion’s history, Clifton’s most recent request to the SEC was even more so.
Last July 18, Clifton sought “all materials within SEC File No. HO-784.” The mysterious case number refers to the SEC’s investigative file on the 1970s Warren Buffett–Charlie Munger takeover of Wesco Financial Corp., a California S&L. The existence of the SEC investigative file is legendary, and it remains potent today because it is the only major regulatory probe ever opened on Berkshire Hathaway’s founders. The case is still viewed as a rare window into how even the world’s most disciplined investors once pushed the limits of securities law (no charges were ever filed).
Burry sees himself as a latter-day Buffet, and has proudly pointed to Buffet’s calling him “Cassandra” – the cursed, tragic prophet of Greek mythology whose dire warnings about future events were doomed to be ignored.
For someone who built his legend betting against the crowd and often fighting conventional wisdom, the shift to Cassandra Unchained may be Burry’s best trade yet. The market can remain irrational; the subscribers will still renew.
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Next: FOIA Sweep: Breaking down a month’s worth of requests from Capitol Forum – 89 in all – to the FDA.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His next book, Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful summer before Watergate, will be out next year. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
