Michael Burry, fund manager of “The Big Short” fame, seemed to welcome You’re here CEO Elon Musk purchase of a 9.2% stake in Twitter this week.
“Of course @elonmusk buying enough stock to control Twitter would be good for America,” Burry said in a now-deleted tweet. “Period.”
The head of Scion Asset Management shared a link to a Boston Herald Editorialwho criticized the New York Times and the Washington Post for having initially dismissed the controversy around Hunter Biden in the fall of 2020.
The editorial noted that the two newspapers had publishedstories in recent weeks on President Joe Biden’s son and his dealings with energy companies in China and Ukraine. In October 2020, the New York Post first reported on the emails, which apparently showed that Hunter Biden had been paid millions of dollars for months of work and had taken advantage of his father’s public stature to his personal gain.
Scion and the White House did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Facebook and Twitter limited sharing of the Hunter Biden story, citing their rules regarding the distribution of disputed information and pirated material, respectively. Twitter also permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account shortly after the attack on the US Capitol in early January 2021, citing the risk of further incitement to violence. Meanwhile, Facebook decided last June to ban the president from posting for two years.
Burry has previously lambasted the mainstream media for ignoring the Hunter Biden story, and bristled when Trump was launched on Twitter. He may be hoping that Musk who recently interviewed if Twitter does enough to defend free speech, it will prompt banned accounts to be reinstated and push for looser restrictions on what users can post.
The Scion boss is best known for predicting the mid-2000s housing crash, and opening the way for the GameStop stock market boom in January 2021.
His ostensible vote of confidence in Musk is somewhat surprising, as he is ridiculed The valuation of Tesla and bet on its stock from falling in recent years. Moreover, he accused Musk to sell Tesla stock last year to make a profit and cover his personal debts, not to pay more taxes, as the billionaire claimed.
“Burry is a broken clock,” Musk shot back at the time.
It’s possible Burry was sarcastic in his tweet about Musk’s control of Twitter being a good thing, given his skepticism of Big Tech and his past attacks on the Tesla CEO and his company. However, the investor’s complaints about Trump’s ban and media coverage of the Hunter Biden saga could mean he sees Musk’s involvement as a positive development in the matter.
bury disabled his Twitter account after a clash with Musk in November. He marked his return to the platform in March posting a photo of himself from 1977. Burry was likely drawing parallels between soaring inflation, slowing growth, soaring energy prices and the international conflicts of the 1970s , and the current state of the world.
In another tweet this week, Burry appeared to question the Federal Reserve’s ability to rein in rising prices without crashing markets or dragging the US economy into recession. “I’m not sure even the Fed can stem that river,” he said.
