🐻 The Bear Bought Calls

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Michael Burry bought call options on a stock he is actively shorting.

That stock is Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 4.0% ). The one he keeps calling a bubble.

He picked up December calls with strikes in the mid-to-high $200s and paid single digits for them.

His label for the trade: a hedge. He says he is "not playing for gains here" and would never have bought them without a huge short and put position sitting behind it.

He bought insurance on his own pessimism.

Burry's total short stock position is now more than 21% of his portfolio. That excludes puts, so the real bearish tilt is bigger than the headline number.

He added to shorts in:

Four AI-adjacent names and a bulldozer company.

On the buy side, he is adding to Birkenstock $BIRK ( ▲ 1.5% ) and Freddie Mac $FMCC ( ▼ 0.75% ). Sandals and mortgage paper. About as far from a GPU as you can get without leaving the stock market.

Here is Burry on the stock he is short: "On the face of it, the stock is wildly undervalued."

He is not being sarcastic. He points to a low P/E for a business growing fast while collecting monopoly rents.

That comes after Wednesday's Q2 numbers sailed past Wall Street, with an unprecedented long-term forecast calling for 70% growth through fiscal 2028. Companies that size are supposed to be out of runway.

So why stay short?

Because his own theoretical value for Nvidia lands much lower than today's market price. He thinks the company will not return enough to shareholders, and that investing into and through the top of a bubble tends to end in shocking earnings reductions before long.

He also flags that Nvidia has fallen more often than it has risen after recent earnings, and that the current price does not square with the narrative the market keeps repeating. The stock has been treading water compared with recent years.

His call on the earnings reaction: a coin flip. "The market does not believe."

Burry's bear case runs through capital spending and shareholder returns. Price action and momentum barely feature, which makes it a slow thesis that can be wrong for a long time before it is right.

The calls are the tell. Even the loudest bear on the tape paid to cap his upside risk into a print he admits is a coin flip.

That is what conviction with a seatbelt looks like.

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Nvidia is buying a company named after an emoji for $12.9 billion.

That's Hugging Face, the platform where basically every AI developer on earth goes to grab models and datasets. Reportedly sold. Reportedly for $12.9B.

The company does about $150M in annualized revenue. So Nvidia is paying roughly 86 times sales. For context, that's the kind of multiple normally reserved for pre-revenue biotech and things your cousin bought in 2021.

Late 2025, Nvidia offered $500M for a stake at a ~$7B valuation.

Hugging Face said no.

Months later, the price is $12.9B. That "no" was worth about $6 billion. Best negotiating tactic in tech history apparently.

The business is actually working. Fast:

And the customer list reads like a roll call of everyone building AI: Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, IBM, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Salesforce, ServiceNow.

Nvidia wasn't just an investor. It was a heavy user. Delangue said in March 2025 that almost 2,000 Nvidia employees were on the Enterprise Hub. Buying the thing your staff already lives in is one way to cut the subscription bill.

Nvidia sells the shovels. Everyone knows that.

This deal buys the goldfield.

Hugging Face is where developers, models and applications actually meet. Owning it plugs Nvidia's hardware directly into the software layer that decides what gets built and how.

Jensen Huang said on Wednesday's earnings call that the world will need both closed and open models, and that use of both is climbing hard. Then his company went and bought the home of open models. Subtle.

Oh, and Hugging Face has become a robotics player too, after picking up Gradio in 2021 and Pollen Robotics in 2025. Robotics datasets on the platform went from 1,145 in 2024 to 26,991 in 2025. That's a 23x jump in one year.

Three things worth sitting with.

One: private AI valuations are still going vertical. Hugging Face raised at $4.5B in August 2023. Three years later, $12.9B. The AI repricing hasn't cooled, it's just moved off public markets where you can't touch it.

Two: Nvidia is buying its way up the stack. A chipmaker spending nearly $13B on software is a chipmaker planning for a world where chips alone aren't the whole moat.

Three: watch who quietly loses. Every cloud provider on that customer list now rents from a competitor. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just got a new reason to build their own version.

Also, the founders reportedly picked 🤗 hoping to be the first company to IPO with an emoji ticker instead of three letters. That dream is dead. They got $12.9B as a consolation prize.

Mark Cuban just co-signed a Senate campaign's healthcare plan.

The candidate is James Talarico, a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives now running for US Senate. The plan gets its public rollout at a Fort Worth event on Aug. 29.

His pitch, in his own words: break up the "Big Medicine monopolies."

Talarico told CNBC the plan is built to lower prescription drug prices, cut medical debt, and hand prescribing decisions back to doctors instead of insurance companies.

The mechanism is antitrust. He's backing legislation aimed at vertically integrated healthcare conglomerates: pharmacy benefit managers, insurers, and hospital networks.

"Vertically integrated" is doing a lot of hiding there. In plain English: one company can own the insurer, the middleman deciding which drugs get covered, and the pharmacy that sells them to you.

Your coverage, your drug menu, and your pharmacy counter, all reporting to the same boardroom. Cosy.

Cuban has skin in this exact fight. He's a founder of Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that sells medication cheap by cutting out the middlemen.

Those middlemen are the same pharmacy benefit managers the plan wants dismantled.

Cuban framed his support as party-agnostic, arguing that everyone wants cheaper and better healthcare regardless of who they vote for.

Nothing today. This is a campaign proposal from a candidate who has to win a Senate seat first, then move a bill through a chamber where the affected industries employ extremely good lobbyists.

The thing worth tracking is the theme. Political pressure on drug middlemen keeps building from both parties, and if it ever turns into law, the squeeze lands on the companies sitting between your prescription and the pharmacy counter.

Drugmakers get the headlines. The middlemen take the margin.