Michael Burry has denied taking a short position on Tesla — telling social media users on Wednesday that he isn’t betting against the electric vehicle giant’s stock even after branding it “ridiculously overvalued.”
Burry, the Scion Asset Management boss made famous by the hit film “The Big Short,” responded to a user on X who asked if he would short Tesla with a blunt line: “I am not short.”
The denial came after Burry knocked Tesla’s valuation in a separate post and in comments to subscribers of his paid Substack newsletter earlier this month.
Tesla rattled investors this week by publishing its own compilation of analyst delivery estimates — a move that multiple outlets described as unusual for the company.
By Tesla’s count, analysts on average expect 422,850 deliveries in the fourth quarter, down 15% from a year earlier.
For the full year, Tesla posted an average estimate of about 1.6 million deliveries in 2025 — roughly an 8% drop from 2024 — setting the company up for a second straight annual decline.
Deliveries are the closest proxy Tesla provides for vehicle sales, but the company does not precisely define the metric in shareholder communications.
Burry’s Wednesday remark follows his recent string of high-profile bearish calls on the AI boom, including disclosed put options tied to Palantir and Nvidia and a public accusation that big cloud “hyperscalers” are padding earnings by stretching depreciation assumptions on AI hardware.
Tesla shares have swung sharply in 2025, pressured earlier in the year by slowing sales and intensifying competition, including from Chinese EV makers, as well as blowback tied to Elon Musk’s political activity.
Even with the volatility, Tesla’s stock hit a record closing price of $489.88 on Dec. 16, according to stock-price data compiled by Macrotrends and reporting from UPI. As of Wednesday afternoon, it was trading at around $453 per share.
Burry has tangled with Tesla before. In 2021, Scion disclosed put options tied to Tesla shares that drew headlines as a major bearish bet, before Burry later said the position was closed.
This time, he’s drawing a bright line between calling the company overpriced and actually placing a trade against it.
The latest Tesla debate is unfolding as Musk notched a legal win in Washington. The National Labor Relations Board is abandoning a complaint against Musk’s SpaceX over severance and arbitration policies, according to a joint court filing cited by Bloomberg.
The agency agreed in December to withdraw its case after SpaceX challenged the NLRB’s structure as unconstitutional.
The retreat resolves one front of a broader legal fight between Musk’s companies and federal regulators and comes as the labor board, now led by a Trump-appointed general counsel, has pulled back from several high-profile enforcement actions.
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