Despite being far more recent than the short position, Michael Burry’s bullish bet on Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) stock appears to already be paying off thanks to the semiconductor giant’s strong rally after the earnings.
Specifically, the legendary ‘Big Short’ investor acquired call options for the blue-chip chipmaker as a hedge ahead of the company’s August 26 earnings. On the day, NVDA shares closed at $209.66, and they met the September 3 evening bell at $228.45: 8.96% higher.
Additionally, Nvidia stock rose another 1.18% in the latest extended session and is trading at $231.15 at press time on Friday.
Under the circumstances, investors who took Burry’s decision to create a hedge as a strong ‘buy’ signal and purchased $1,000 worth of the equity would, by the morning of September 4, have $1,102.50: a $102.50 profit.
The speed of the latest rally is further underlined by the fact that traders who made a long bet of the same size at the start of 2026 would have $1,223.99, indicating that nearly half of the potential NVDA investment profits came in less than 10 days.
Notably, neither the decision to buy Nvidia stock call options nor the latest NVDA rally changed Michael Burry’s bearish attitude toward the semiconductor giant and the artificial intelligence (AI) ‘boom’.
Why Michael Burry has not turned bullish on Nvidia stock
Indeed, though the ‘Big Short’ trader’s bet against the blue-chip maker started last year, he seemingly turned even more pessimistic regarding the equity by mid-August, when he claimed to have identified ‘echoes of Enron’ in the company.
At the time, Burry highlighted Nvidia’s announcement about a series of memorandums of understanding (MoU) with a set of high-profile investment banks as little more than a ploy to obfuscate growing risks surrounding the company.
The rising costs to insure the firm’s debt were a focal point, though multiple uncertainties with the company’s accounting exacerbate the issues.
For example, the late August earnings – despite disclosing undeniably strong results – also led to questions about clients being permitted to postpone their payments by up to 12 months, as well as the severe customer concentration in accounts receivable balance.
Even more recently, Nvidia’s acquisition of Hugging Face appears to have at least partially undermined the goal of the MoUs – to dispel circular financing concerns – since it appears to confirm that there are vanishingly few actors in the supposedly global AI ‘boom.’
Furthermore, the MoUs – announced as made to secure $500 billion for AI infrastructure – could truly prove more of an obfuscation method, as Burry posited, considering they are not final and might easily come to naught.
Crucially, Nvidia’s $100 billion plan to invest in OpenAI in late 2025 was disclosed with a similar disclaimer regarding follow-through and was, indeed, ultimately quietly dropped.
