Elemental ZG
147 posts
Port down -$225k today 😭
How about you guys?
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🚨Michael Burry says Nvidia has 3 big customers and if they stop buying the whole thing is over.
Those 3 customers now account for 64% of Nvidia's entire accounts receivable.
In 2020 that number was 33%. It jumped 8 percentage points in a single quarter.
Nvidia's revenue is not spread across a broad market. It is almost entirely dependent on a handful of buyers.
Burry's argument is about why those buyers may slow down or stop entirely.
He calls it the "bezzle." The bezzle is not that AI is fake. It is that a massive portion of current AI spending is coming from companies that are benchmarking models, testing systems, and competing on AI leaderboards.
That activity is temporary. It will end. But it is being counted and financed today as if it is permanent growing demand.
He says: "They are just flying empty airplanes around."
When that benchmarking phase ends those 3 concentrated customers have far less reason to keep ordering chips at the current pace.
And because Nvidia's revenue is this concentrated even a partial slowdown from those buyers creates a massive hole in its numbers.
Now here is where it gets more alarming.
Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle together have $662 billion in off balance sheet AI commitments according to Moody's.
Standard accounting rules allow companies to keep this completely hidden from their reported numbers.
To fund this infrastructure private equity firms have been buying life insurance companies.
But why?
A PE firm owns illiquid investments that need financing. It buys an insurance company which collects premiums from ordinary policyholders. That insurance company then invests those premiums into the PE firm's own illiquid assets.
The PE firm then sets up a captive reinsurer in Bermuda with lighter capital requirements and pushes the insurance risk onto that offshore balance sheet.
Burry's point is that all of this is connected. The same PE firms own the insurance companies funding the AI debt. The same Bermuda structures hold the risk.
If any major hyperscaler walks away from a data center commitment everything hits at the same time because every counterparty in the chain is linked to the same underlying assets.
The AI boom is being measured during the most artificial phase of the buildout.
Nobody knows what real demand looks like when the benchmarking phase is over and $662 billion in hidden commitments needs to be serviced.
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The debt Burry called fake is trading 6% above its face value.
Apollo has already booked $250 million in gains on this position.
Debt built on fake numbers does not trade above par, It collapses.
The deal was announced in a public Apollo press release on January 7, 2026. Latham and Watkins, Proskauer Rose, and Sullivan and Cromwell are named as legal counsel on the transaction.
These are three of the largest law firms on Wall Street.
Valor is a fund managed by Valor Equity Partners a real, established asset management firm with institutional limited partners.
The structure is a chip sale leaseback. Nvidia sold the GPUs. Valor holds legal title. xAI leases and operates them. Every party is named. Every dollar is disclosed.
This structure is not unique to this deal. Meta, Oracle, and CoreWeave have moved more than $120 billion in AI infrastructure off their balance sheets using identical SPV structures funded by PIMCO, BlackRock, Blue Owl, and JPMorgan.
This is now standard practice across every major technology company building AI infrastructure.
Athene holds $34 billion in regulatory capital with a 441% RBC ratio against a 100% regulatory minimum. 95% of its portfolio is fixed income. 97% of that fixed income is investment grade. The leverage target is below 30%.
The Bermuda structure operates under a regime the European Union recognizes as equivalent to its own Solvency II standard.
The NAIC classifies Bermuda as a Qualified Jurisdiction. A dollar of reserves there carries identical regulatory weight to a dollar held in the US.
None of this means the risks do not exist. xAI burns approximately $1 billion a month.
The SPV structures do add leverage that does not show up cleanly on balance sheets.
These are real concerns. But there is a difference between a known, disclosed, priced risk and a fraud. This is the former.
Bull Theory@BullTheoryio
🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers. Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake. He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing. Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor. Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale. Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models. But here is what Burry is flagging. Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory. They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies. Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle. Now here is where American retirees enter the picture. Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit. Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene. Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans. When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center. The numbers inside Athene are most alarming. Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight. Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets. Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth. The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times. Burry's says: Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing. - Nvidia books the revenue. - Apollo collects the fees. - xAI gets the computing power. - And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
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🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.
Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.
He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.
Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.
Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.
Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.
But here is what Burry is flagging.
Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.
They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.
Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.
Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.
Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.
Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.
Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.
When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.
The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.
Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.
Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.
Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.
The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.
Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.
- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
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@VJNCapital @StockSavvyShay Secured power + secured GPU’s+ bottleneck and race to compute= money printer go brrrr. Simple.
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@StockSavvyShay This is the part where it gets sketchy for me
Financing future projects with money they don’t have…
This is a race to the bottom as saturation will hit at some point
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$IREN reportedly secured ~$3.6B in financing to buy $NVDA GPUs for AI compute capacity tied to its $MSFT data center deal.
The funding includes ~$2.1B from private bond sales and ~$1.5B in project finance loans to support its Texas AI infrastructure buildout.
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@BullTheoryio I imagine the majority of us would be very happy to no longer see any headlines, media, content, etc. mentioning Michael Burry.
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🚨 MICHAEL BURRY WARNS THREE UPCOMING IPOs COULD COMPLETELY CRASH THE STOCK MARKET.
Michael Burry reported that the upcoming public listings for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are going to pull more capital out of the market than the entire dot-com wave of 2000.
Adjusted for inflation, just these three companies will raise more money than the hundreds of tech firms that flooded the market at the peak of the 2000 bubble.
The historical data from 2000 shows exactly why this is dangerous for stocks.
That year, the market saw 446 IPOs raise a record $108.15 billion. The Nasdaq peaked on March 10, 2000, at the exact moment this massive supply of new shares hit the market, right before crashing 80%.
The crash happened because of a simple liquidity drain.
When giant companies go public, big institutional funds need cash to buy the new shares.
To get that cash, they have to sell their existing stock positions. This creates immediate selling pressure on the most expensive tech stocks.
Today, the setup is identical but much more concentrated. Instead of hundreds of small startups spreading out the drain, just three mega companies are absorbing the market's capital.
This directly impacts current market leaders.
Microsoft has 49% of its $627 billion cloud backlog tied to OpenAI, and Oracle has 54% of its pipeline dependent on it.
The same big funds that need to buy the new IPOs are the ones currently holding these tech giants.
In the first quarter of 2000, the average IPO nearly doubled on its first trading day because cash was easily available.
By the fourth quarter, capital markets dried up.
Gross IPO proceeds collapsed 63% in a single quarter, and average first-day gains dropped to just 14% as companies rushed into layoffs and bankruptcies.
When an unprecedented amount of money is pulled out of existing stocks to fund a single massive IPO wave, the broader market historically runs out of the liquidity needed to sustain its peak.
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@manly_mentor What about finding a woman that doesn’t allow you to make content in a robe? Must’ve missed that one or still be looking.
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Never marry a woman until she passes these 5 tests...
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@WatcherGuru Did he lose 10 years in the last year? Lookin a little different here.
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JUST IN: Billionaire Mark Cuban says he sold "most" of his Bitcoin.
"Bitcoin has lost the plot."
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Anthropic paying 1.25B/month or 15B/year for 300MW or 220k GPUs. Bare metals. Please sign $IREN up for this. IREN Mackenzie GPUs online later this year.
Sawyer Merritt@SawyerMerritt
Wow, Anthropic has agreed to pay @SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for AI compute capacity, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. Huge deal
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JUST IN: Claude AI developer Anthropic to pay Elon Musk's SpaceX $1.25 billion per month until May 2029.
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@DumbMoneyTV @icedcoffeehour Possible, if “you” buy into feeding your agent all your info and give it full access to your life. Humans continue to value privacy. Unlikely hypothesis, or very far out.
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What is one clear double right now in the market within 12 months?
I’ll give you 4
$BABA
$NVO
$OSCR
$ZETA
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Good things to consider which I can appreciate but the sensationalized overtones are too much.
CPE is still strong despite high oil prices in the "wartime economy", banks numbers are still seeming unaffected by the real estate foreclosures and predominantly are doing fine, and although the 2008 crisis did involve foreclosures it certainly did not start in the same way.
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🚨THIS IS VERY DANGEROUS FOR AMERICAN ECONOMY.
Nearly 119,000 American families lost their homes to foreclosure in just the first 3 months of 2026.
That is a six year high and it is getting worse every single month.
Foreclosure starts are up 20% year over year. Bank repossessions jumped 45% compared to a year ago. Bank repossessions are the most alarming number here.
Banks do not take homes back until every other option has been exhausted. A 45% jump means a growing number of Americans have completely run out of options.
This is happening because owning a home in America has become unaffordable even for people who already own one. Mortgage rates are above 7%. Property taxes are rising. Home insurance costs have doubled in many states.
And wages have not kept up with any of it. People who bought homes at peak COVID prices cannot sell because prices have dropped, cannot refinance because rates are too high, and cannot afford the monthly carrying costs anymore.
The S&P 500 is at an all time high. Corporate profits are surging. And 119,000 families lost their homes in a single quarter.
When this many homeowners start losing their homes at the same time, banks absorb losses, consumer spending drops, neighborhoods deteriorate, and the broader economy starts feeling it from the bottom up.
The 2008 crisis started the same way, not with a market crash, but with foreclosure data that everyone ignored until it was too late.
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@Banana3Stocks Broke previous highs and lookin' like a chase.
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Carpenter's 800 year-old rude carving found hidden in church ceiling ....
In 2021, images of an 800 year-old carving have gone viral after the X-rated art was uncovered in a public church in England 🏴🇬🇧
It is believed a carpenter hid the rude carving in a church roof, and it has now been discovered a whole 800 years later. The carving had been hidden from the public until the church built a new cafe, exposing the funny piece of woodwork.
Church-goers at All Saints Church in Hereford, England; were shocked when a photo of the man with his legs up exposing himself in the ceiling went viral. Work reportedly began on the church roof around 1200 AD, and was completed around 1330 AD.
It was not until a new gallery with a cafe was built in the church in the 1990s, that the artwork was discovered. The reclining nude man, nicknamed Seamus O'Toole, is believed to have been carved into the rafters in 15th Century AD.
The images made it onto Reddit where thousands of people commented, many pointing out the artwork is proof trolling is not a modern thing. "He probably sat in the church, looking up at, knowing no one else knew it was there, tittering to himself," one person wrote;
"Words can't describe how much I love this,"
Another one said, "Never in a million years did the person who made this think thousands of people around the world would see it," someone else pointed out.
Another person quoted: “He probably sat in the church, looking up at, knowing no one else knew it was there, tittering to himself.”
#archaeohistories
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