Month: November 2025

• The latest beef in the business world is Michael Burry vs. Alex Karp.
• The investor of “The Big Short” fame revealed he recently bet against Palantir, angering CEO Karp.
• Their clash speaks to a divide in the business world between AI’s believers and skeptics.

Step aside, Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman. There’s a new beef in the business world, and it centers on the stock market’s biggest question: Is the AI boom a bubble?

Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame and Palantir CEO Alex Karp have been trading barbs after the investor revealed he bet on Palantir’s stock to plunge last quarter.

The pair’s clash boils down to a fundamental difference in views that’s a microcosm of the market’s big divide.

Burry’s assessment is that AI is a bubble, and the valuations of companies like Palantir are way out of whack. Karp’s perspective is that Palantir is pioneering a technological revolution, its stock gains should be celebrated for enriching everyday Americans, and betting on his company to fail is just plain wrong.

The wider investing community is similarly split between those who say current valuations are justified because AI will change the world, boost productivity, and supercharge economic growth and corporate profits, and those who warn they’re overinflated and destined to burst like the dot-com bubble.

While Musk and Altman are wrestling over OpenAI, Burry and Karp’s dispute hinges on whether AI is worth every billion being thrown at it, or just the latest case of speculative fervor.

The long and short of Burry vs. Karp

The feud began with Burry’s Scion Asset Management disclosing last Monday that at the end of September, it held bearish put options on 5 million Palantir shares and 1 million Nvidia shares, worth a notional $912 million and $187 million, respectively.

Burry had returned to X a few days earlier after a two-year hiatus, posting a cryptic message suggesting AI hype is unsustainable — but so perilous that “the only winning move” is to not get involved.

He later posted an array of charts, book excerpts, and “Star Wars” memes drawing parallels between AI and the dot-com bubble.

Burry’s 13F filing was published on the same day as Palantir’s third-quarter earnings. Shares of the AI-powered data analysis company tumbled as much as 10% the next day, and Karp lashed out at Burry on CNBC.

“As far as I can tell, the two companies he’s shorting are the ones making all the money, which is super weird,” Karp said. “The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is batshit crazy.”

Burry fired back on X: “Doesn’t surprise me one bit that Alex Karp and his ‘ontology’ … cannot crack a simple 13F.”

The Scion boss — best known for his massive bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble, which was immortalized in “The Big Short” — was likely nodding to 13Fs being published with a six-week lag, so Karp had no firm reason to think Burry had kept his Palantir and Nvidia puts throughout October and early November.

Burry underscored that point in another X post : “Fake news! I am not 5’6” — meaning he’s not short, physically or in his portfolio.

Palantir stock has surged about 30-fold since the start of 2023, propelling it to a $453 billion market capitalization as of Tuesday’s close. That’s more than 100 times its projected revenue this year.

Burry has doubled down on his bearish AI stance, posting on Monday that so-called hyperscalers such as Meta and Oracle are artificially boosting their earnings by understating the depreciation rates of their computing equipment.

“More detail coming November 25th,” he teased. “Stay tuned.”

Why Musk is sparring with Altman

The other high-profile duel in the AI world right now is, of course, Musk vs. Altman.

Altman and Musk cofounded OpenAI along with two others in 2015. Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018, founded rival xAI in 2023, and has filed multiple lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI.

Musk has accused Altman of “stealing” the organization from him, and of abandoning its founding mission by not keeping its code open-source, and by converting it from a nonprofit into a for-profit company.

Altman recently fired back at Musk on X, saying he “helped turn the thing you left for dead into what should be the largest nonprofit ever.”

But there’s an important difference here. While the Altman-Musk split is about competing visions for the future of AI, Karp and Burry disagree over the technology’s true worth — and whether the corporate titans harnessing it are overvalued.

There’s a rich history of investors betting against big companies

Burry is just the latest investor to wager that a company will falter and get in a shouting match with its defenders.

Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn famously shorted Lehman Brothers months before it collapsed in September 2008 and helped trigger a global financial crisis.

In presentations to investors and emails to management, he called out the investment bank’s aggressive accounting and excessive leverage, and said it was putting itself and the financial system at risk by not addressing its problems. He was soon proven right.

Similarly, Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates spotted red flags at Enron and shorted the energy giant before it filed for bankruptcy in late 2001.

On the other hand, both Einhorn and Chanos have previously shorted Tesla and criticized Musk. Yet the automaker has defied its skeptics to become one of the world’s most valuable companies, with a $1.5 trillion market capitalization.

Both investors have raised similar concerns to Burry about the AI boom. Einhorn recently warned the industry’s spending binge could result in a “tremendous amount of capital destruction,” and said the figures being “thrown around are so extreme that it’s really, really hard to understand them.”

Chanos recently made the same point as Burry about AI companies dragging out depreciation and delivering a “huge boost” to their reported earnings. He warned there could be a reckoning over the returns from their investments in microchips and servers, and both spending and earnings could “collapse” like they did during the dot-com crash and 2008 crisis.

Whether Burry or Karp will be vindicated in their views on the AI boom is an open question. For now, the business world is waiting for the answer.

• A New York law requires businesses to disclose when they’re using algorithms to determine prices.
• Uber and DoorDash users started encountering the disclosures on Monday, when the law took effect.
• The law doesn’t require companies to disclose exactly how the information affects prices.

New Yorkers got a little more visibility this week into when apps like Uber and DoorDash use algorithms to set prices.

The state’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act took effect on Monday. Under the law, businesses have to tell customers when they are using their personal data, such as where they are and what they’ve purchased in the past, to determine prices.

For some New York residents, the first sign of the new law was a message that popped up on their phone screen while ordering food delivery.

On the DoorDash app, New York users got a notice that the new law “requires that we make the following disclosure because we use information such as your delivery address to calculate distance and fees, and your past orders and favorite stores to provide personalized promotions and/or discounts.”

“This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data,” the disclosure reads.

Uber users in the state may have noticed a similar disclosure on the screen before checkout on the app, although it didn’t cite the new law.

“This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data,” the disclosure reads. “Your location is used to help us calculate fees and savings.”

The notice did not appear in the app when Business Insider used it outside New York. A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the disclosure.

These new disclosures tell customers when businesses are using algorithms and customer data to determine prices. But exactly how companies like Uber and DoorDash use that information to serve up prices to users, in many cases, remains a mystery.

Uber’s ride-hailing business, for example, has implemented what the company calls upfront pricing over the last few years. The model took the company away from a more predictable rate card for pricing rides and toward a system that uses Uber’s data on past trips and users to determine pricing.

A study conducted earlier this year found that upfront pricing has helped Uber determine the most money that riders are willing to pay for a trip — a tactic that helped the company become profitable, the study said. Uber said in June that its algorithms “do not use information about an individual rider or driver’s personal characteristics” to set prices.

Do you have a story to share about Uber, DoorDash, or another gig-work company? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com.

• Ford’s CEO has some advice for ambitious execs: take a supply chain job.
• Jim Farley told the “Office Hours: Business Edition” podcast that supply chain skills are transferable to the CEO role.
• Ford has been battling supply chain disruption this year as US tariffs have rocked the auto industry.

The boss of Ford has some advice for up-and-coming executives: ditch CEO for CSCO.

Speaking on an upcoming episode of “Office Hours: Business Edition,” Jim Farley said people should aim for supply chain roles if they want to change the world and climb the corporate ladder.

“I would say of all the C-suite jobs that people should aspire to, if you want to make a difference in our society, I would pick one — supply chain,” the Ford CEO told host Monica Langley in the interview, which is set to be released Wednesday morning.

Farley said that at large companies such as Ford, supply chain leaders must have a firm grasp of everything from technology to geopolitics.

“It’s no surprise to me that Tim Cook and many of the CEOs in great companies today come from a supply chain background,” said Farley, referring to the boss of Apple.

“No surprise at all to me, because the leadership required to be world-class at supply chains is the same capability you need to run a company,” he added.

The role of chief supply chain officer, or CSCO, has become increasingly important over the past few years. Some of the world’s largest companies are now led by CEOs with a background in supply chains.

Cook first joined Apple as a supply chain executive and played a vital role in building the tech giant’s global manufacturing prowess. Mary Barra, the CEO of Ford’s crosstown rival GM, also oversaw the company’s global supply chain before becoming chief executive in 2014.

Farley’s comments come as the global auto industry grapples with a wave of supply chain disruptions.

The tariffs introduced by the Trump administration earlier this year have forced automakers, which typically have factories and suppliers spread across the globe, to reshuffle their supply chains and production plans.

Ford said in its latest earnings that it expects the tariffs to cost it around $1 billion this year, while rival GM has projected a tariff hit of $3.5-4.5 billion.

Farley’s manufacturing jobs warning

Farley has regularly warned that not enough attention is being paid to manufacturing jobs in the US, telling the “Office Hours” podcast that the country is in “deep trouble” compared to China.

In an opinion piece for TIME in August, the Ford CEO called for more vocational training programs to address workforce shortages in the construction and manufacturing industries.

Speaking to “Office Hours,” Farley warned that the US was also far too dependent on other countries, such as China, for vital materials like rare earths, which are used to manufacture advanced magnets that are critical to the auto industry.

China imposed restrictions on imports of rare earths earlier this year amid the trade war with the US, sparking supply chain chaos at automakers and other manufacturers across the globe.

“I don’t think most Americans have any idea how scary our dependency is on certain countries,” said Farley.

The Detroit executive also told the podcast that he was “humbled” after taking apart EVs from Tesla and Chinese upstarts, and that it spurred him into shaking up Ford.