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華爾街日報Michael Burry Created A Stock Market Game In The 1980s With Just 'BASIC' Skills, Reveals This Warren Buffett Book As His 'Must Read' Favorite
Michael Burry, the investor famous for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, shared insights about why mastering an industry isn't necessary to succeed in investing.
Michael Burry's Early Tech Journey
On Thursday, taking to X, Burry recalled that in 1982–83, he and a friend, who would later work at Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), created a stock market game using a semi-random number generator on his friend's family's new IBM (NYSE:IBM) PC.
"We printed up and sold stock certificates to friends. He and I co-founded the Computer Science club at Santa Teresa High in 1987," he wrote.
Burry also learned Pascal, APL and HTML. He later worked at IBM research facilities in Silicon Valley during the late '80s and early '90s, describing debugging as "horrific" in the terminal-based, pre-WYSIWYG environment.
WYSIWYG, short for “What You See Is What You Get,” is a type of editor where content looks the same while editing as it will when published. It lets people add text, images, and format layouts visually, without needing to write code, making it easy for non-coders to create documents or web pages.
Burry also revealed that his first coding assistant was an HTML editor called HoT MetaL, which he used around 1995.
He also noted that during the 1998–2000 dot-com boom, he worked near Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley. "Though I was in medicine."
You Don't Need Silicon Valley Ties To Invest Successfully: Burry
Burry noted that growing up and raising his children in Silicon Valley meant he was surrounded by semiconductor executives and successful startup founders.
However, he said he eventually pursued other paths, hasn't coded in three decades and never studied accounting.
"None of this really means anything. Being a good investor in an industry does not require having worked in the industry. It just requires work (and lots of reading)," he wrote.
How Reading Buffett's Biography Shaped Burry's Investing
In response to a question about his favorite must-read book, Burry cited "Buffett: Making of an American Capitalist" by Roger Lowenstein.
When asked whether he considers Warren Buffett the greatest investor of our time, Burry reflected on Lowenstein's 1995 biography, saying Buffett "was a force of nature."
He added that reading the book helped him understand the level of skill required to achieve greatness like Buffett—though he admitted it was a standard he could never fully reach, only aspire to.
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Michael Burry: Net Worth, Career And 2008 Housing Market Bet
Burry currently has a net worth of $200 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He is widely recognized for predicting and profiting from the 2008 housing market collapse.
His story was chronicled in Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short" and later adapted into the Oscar-winning film of the same name, where Burry was portrayed by Christian Bale.
Originally trained as a medical doctor, Burry founded Scion Capital, a hedge fund, in 2000. His strategy focused on identifying undervalued stocks and shorting overhyped assets, producing strong returns in the early 2000s, even amid the dot-com crash.
Nowadays, he has been making significant ripples following his accusations that Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) might be using accounting tricks to inflate its market value.
Benzinga Edge Rankings place Nvidia in the 97th percentile for growth. Click here to see how it performs in other metrics compared to companies like AMD and INTC.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.