[9] Despite not practicing, Burry has kept his license as a physician active with the Medical Board of California, including continuing education requirements.
He was so successful with his stock picks that he attracted the interest of companies such as Vanguard, White Mountains Insurance Group and prominent investors such as Joel Greenblatt.
He has said more than once that his investment style is built upon Benjamin Graham and David Dodd’s 1934 book Security Analysis: "All my stock picking is 100% based on the concept of a margin of safety.
"[6] Burry was able to achieve these returns partly by shorting overvalued tech stocks at the peak of the internet bubble.
Through his analysis of mortgage lending practices in 2003 and 2004, he correctly predicted that the real estate bubble would collapse as early as 2007.
This conclusion led him to short the market by persuading Goldman Sachs and other investment firms to sell him credit default swaps against subprime deals he saw as vulnerable.
[6] Scion Capital ultimately recorded returns of 489.34% (net of fees and expenses) between its November 1, 2000, inception and June 2008.
[6] According to his website, Burry liquidated his credit default swap short positions by April 2008 and did not benefit from the bailouts of 2008 and 2009.
[20] In August 2019, Bloomberg News quoted an email from Burry in which he said there was a bubble in large US company stocks due to the popularity of passive investing, which "has orphaned smaller value-type securities globally".
[28] During the second quarter of 2021, he reportedly held put options valued at almost $31 million on the ARKK ETF innovation index managed by Ark Invest.
[29] In August 2023, it was widely reported that Burry's hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, had made a $1.6 billion bet on a US stock market crash.
[9][32][6] He is a fan of heavy metal music, including bands such as Obituary, Lamb of God, Amon Amarth, Slipknot, King Diamond and Pantera.