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4 Days of Cassandra Unchained Tweets on Days Number 3, 13, 15 and Day 82 of “26 Days Of OpenAI Ducking Bankruptcy cc Philip 408-xxx-XXXX

by Larry Chiang on January 21, 2026

The Impending Collapse of OpenAI: Michael Burry’s November 2025 Warnings and the AI Bubble’s Fragile Foundation
As 2025 drew to a close, the artificial intelligence sector faced mounting scrutiny over its astronomical capital expenditures, questionable accounting practices, and unsustainable burn rates. OpenAI, once hailed as the undisputed leader in generative AI, became a focal point of concern. With reported losses ballooning to at least $25 billion in the first three quarters of 2025—far outpacing revenue growth and earlier projections—the company appeared increasingly vulnerable to insolvency. Michael Burry, the contrarian investor immortalized in *The Big Short* for foreseeing the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, re-emerged on X (formerly Twitter) with a series of pointed posts in early-to-mid November 2025. While Burry rarely named OpenAI directly in his most viral threads, his critiques of the broader AI ecosystem—particularly depreciation extensions by hyperscalers like Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, and others—implicitly targeted OpenAI as a core weak link. His tweets around November 5, 13, and 15 framed a narrative of overvaluation, artificial earnings inflation, and inevitable reckoning, fueling speculation that OpenAI’s path mirrored past tech bubbles destined for collapse or bailout.
On or around November 5, 2025, discussions referencing Burry’s earlier November 3 thread (with its iconic “These aren’t the charts you are looking for” Jedi mind trick caption) gained renewed traction in AI-skeptic circles. That original post had highlighted slowing cloud growth rates (e.g., Amazon from 36% to 17% YoY, Microsoft from 22% to 20%), skyrocketing U.S. tech capex reminiscent of the dot-com era, and a “money machine” diagram centering OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation amid massive Nvidia chip purchases and circular investments. By early November, market observers connected these dots to OpenAI’s dire financials. Reports surfaced of the company’s CFO signaling the need for a bailout just days after earlier bravado about self-funding massive commitments. Burry’s silence on November 5 itself did not diminish the momentum; his prior charts served as the backdrop for claims that OpenAI’s trajectory—losses surging +400% year-over-year while revenues grew only +251%—exposed the illusion of sustainable AI economics. The investor’s emphasis on decelerating infrastructure demand suggested that OpenAI, heavily dependent on Microsoft Azure and hyperscaler partnerships, faced eroding unit economics as compute costs outstripped productivity gains.
Burry’s most direct engagement came on November 13, 2025, when he addressed media misreporting of his positions. In a tweet clarifying his Palantir put options (noting he spent $9.2 million, not the $912 million hyped by outlets like CNBC, WSJ, and FT), he dismissed sensationalism while teasing “on to much better things Nov 25th.” This post, accompanied by images breaking down the contract details, reinforced his bearish stance on AI-adjacent plays. Though Palantir was the explicit target, the timing aligned with escalating OpenAI bankruptcy chatter. Burry’s clarification undercut narratives of reckless shorting, instead positioning him as a methodical critic of hype. In the context of OpenAI, this tweet amplified doubts about the sector’s transparency: if media could misread a simple 13F filing, how reliable were valuations built on opaque deals, off-balance-sheet commitments, and projected revenues from unproven enterprise adoption? OpenAI’s rumored $300+ billion cloud agreements and pleas for federal guarantees appeared increasingly desperate against this backdrop.
November 15, 2025, passed without a major new Burry post, yet the period bracketed his November 12 meme (“Me then, me now. Oh well. It worked out. It will work out”)—featuring Christian Bale’s stressed *Big Short* portrayal juxtaposed with calm confidence—and the November 13 clarification. These adjacent messages evoked Burry’s history of being “early but not wrong,” drawing implicit parallels between the subprime fraud he shorted and the AI infrastructure boom. The depreciation critique from November 10 (accusing hyperscalers of extending useful lives of Nvidia gear from 3–5 to 5–6 years, understating $176 billion in expenses from 2026–2028 and overstating earnings by up to 27% for Oracle) loomed large. Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary backer and compute provider, had extended lives similarly, masking the true cost of supporting OpenAI’s training runs. Burry’s warnings implied that when reality hit—via faster obsolescence, power constraints, or revenue shortfalls—entities like OpenAI would be first to crack, unable to service obligations without perpetual capital infusions.
Burry’s November commentary, though not exclusively about OpenAI, painted it as the linchpin of the AI “flywheel” he later called fraudulent. The company’s lack of clear auditing disclosure, massive losses despite revenue jumps, and reliance on partners inflating their own books created a house-of-cards scenario. His posts encouraged skepticism: the same accounting maneuvers boosting hyperscaler earnings propped up OpenAI’s perceived viability. As Burry teased deeper revelations for November 25 (and later extended his critique into 2026 via Substack), his November 5–15 window crystallized a warning: the AI bubble, with OpenAI at its center, risked repeating history—not as a gradual fade, but as a sudden, value-destructive collapse unless external rescues intervened.
In retrospect, Burry’s measured yet unrelenting posts served as a reality check amid euphoria. OpenAI’s hemorrhaging cash, competitive pressures from more efficient rivals, and structural flaws in the compute ecosystem suggested bankruptcy or forced restructuring loomed unless the narrative of inevitable dominance held. Burry, ever the contrarian, reminded the market that bubbles end not with a whimper, but with the exposure of uncomfortable truths—and the math, as always, eventually demands payment.

 
 
Cassandra Unchained
⁦‪@michaeljburry‬⁩
This is not surprising and will not end with OpenAI.
All the capital being being spent and lent by the richest companies on earth will not buy enough time-by the very definition of mania.
The government will pull out all the stops to save the AI bubble to save the market to
 
1/20/26, 8:53 PM
 
 


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