The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

by Michael Lewis

  Again, it was hard for him to see where his physical limitations ended and his psychological ones began--he assumed the glass eye was at the bottom of both. He couldn't stand the unfairness of coaches who favored their own kids. Umpires who missed calls drove him to distraction. He preferred swimming, as it required virtually no social interaction. No teammates. No ambiguity. You just swam your time and you won or you lost.

  After a while even he ceased to find it surprising that he spent most of his time alone. By his late twenties he thought of himself as the sort of person who didn't have friends. He'd gone through Santa Teresa High School in San Jose, UCLA, and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and created not a single lasting bond. What friendships he did have were formed and nurtured in writing, by e-mail; the two people he considered to be true friends he had known for a combined twenty years but had met in person a grand total of eight times. "My nature is not to have friends," he said. "I'm happy in my own head." Somehow he'd married twice. His first wife was a woman of Korean descent who wound up living in a different city ("she often complained that I appeared to like the idea of a relationship more than living the actual relationship") and his second, to whom he was still married, was a Vietnamese-American woman he'd met on Match.com. In his Match.com profile, he described himself frankly as "a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and $145,000 in student loans." His obsession with personal honesty was a cousin to his obsession with fairness.

  Obsessiveness--that was another trait he came to think of as peculiar to himself. His mind had no temperate zone: He was either possessed by a subject or not interested in it at all. There was an obvious downside to this quality--he had more trouble than most faking interest in other people's concerns and hobbies, for instance--but an upside, too. Even as a small child he had a fantastic ability to focus and learn, with or without teachers. When it synced with his interests, school came easy for him--so easy that, as an undergraduate at UCLA, he could flip back and forth between English and economics and pick up enough premedical training on the side to get himself admitted to the best medical schools in the country. He attributed his unusual powers of concentration to his lack of interest in human interaction, and his lack of interest in human interaction...well, he was able to argue that basically everything that happened was caused, one way or the other, by his fake left eye.

  This ability to work and to focus set him apart even from other medical students. In 1998, as a resident in neurology at Stanford Hospital, he mentioned to his superiors that, between fourteen-hour hospital shifts, he had stayed up two nights in a row taking apart and putting back together his personal computer in an attempt to make it run faster. His superiors sent him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed Mike Burry as bipolar. He knew instantly he'd been misdiagnosed: How could you be bipolar if you were never depressed? Or, rather, if you were only depressed while doing your rounds and pretending to be interested in practicing, as opposed to studying, medicine? He'd become a doctor not because he enjoyed medicine but because he didn't find medical school terribly difficult. The actual practice of medicine, on the other hand, either bored or disgusted him. Of his first brush with gross anatomy: "One scene with people carrying legs over their shoulders to the sink to wash out the feces just turned my stomach, and I was done." Of his feeling about the patients: "I wanted to help people--but not really."

  He was genuinely interested in computers, not for their own sake but for their service to a lifelong obsession: the inner workings of the stock market. Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him that the stock market was a crooked place and never to be trusted, let alone invested in, the subject had fascinated him. Even as a kid he had wanted to impose logic on this world of numbers. He began to read about the market as a hobby. Pretty quickly he saw that there was no logic at all in the charts and graphs and waves and the endless chatter of many self-advertised market pros. Then along came the dot-com bubble and suddenly the entire stock market made no sense at all. "The late nineties almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane," he said. Formalized as an approach to financial markets during the Great Depression by Benjamin Graham, "value investing" required a tireless search for companies so unfashionable or misunderstood that they could be bought for less than their liquidation value. In its simplest form value investing was a formula, but it had morphed into other things--one of them was whatever Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham's student, and the most famous value investor, happened to be doing with his money.

  Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. "If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are," Burry said. "At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules.... I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it'd be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true."

  Investing was something you had to learn how to do on your own, in your own peculiar way. Burry had no real money to invest, but he nevertheless dragged his obsession along with him through high school, college, and medical school. He'd reached Stanford Hospital without ever taking a class in finance or accounting, let alone working for any Wall Street firm. He had maybe $40,000 in cash, against $145,000 in student loans. He had spent the previous four years working medical student hours. Nevertheless, he had found time to make himself a financial expert of sorts. "Time is a variable continuum," he wrote to one of his e-mail friends, one Sunday morning in 1999:

  An afternoon can fly by or it can take 5 hours. Like you probably do, I productively fill the gaps that most people leave as dead time. My drive to be productive probably cost me my first marriage and a few days ago almost cost me my fiancee. Before I went to college the military had this "we do more before 9am than most people do all day" and I used to think and I do more than the military. As you know there are some select people that just find a drive in certain activities that supersedes EVERYTHING else.

  He wasn't bipolar. He was merely isolated and apart, without actually feeling lonely or deeply unhappy. He didn't regard himself as a tragedy; he thought, among other things, that his unusual personality enabled him to concentrate better than other people. All of it followed, in his mind, from the warping effects of his fake eye. "That's why I thought people thought I was different," he said. "That's why I thought I was different." Thinking himself different, he didn't find what happened to him when he collided with Wall Street nearly as bizarre as it was.

  Late one night in November 1996, while on a cardiology rotation at St. Thomas Hospital, in Nashville, Tennessee, he logged on to a hospital computer and went to a message board called techstocks.com. There he created a thread called value investing. Having read everything there was to read about investing, he decided to learn a bit more about "investing in the real world." A mania for Internet stocks gripped the market. A site for the Silicon Valley investor, circa 1996, was not a natural home for a sober-minded value investor. Still, many came, all with opinions. A few people grumbled about the very idea of a doctor having anything useful to say about investments, but over time he came to dominate the discussion. Dr. Mike Burry--as he always signed himself--sensed that other people on the thread were taking his advice and making money with it.

  Once he figured out he had nothing more to learn from the crowd on his thread, he quit it to create what later would be called a blog but at the time was just a weird form of communication. He was working sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital, confining his blogging mainly to t
he hours between midnight and three in the morning. On his blog he posted his stock market trades and his arguments for making the trades. People found him. As a money manager at a big Philadelphia value fund said, "The first thing I wondered was, When is he doing this? The guy was a medical intern. I only saw the nonmedical part of his day, and it was simply awesome. He's showing people his trades. And people are following it in real time. He's doing value investing--in the middle of the dot-com bubble. He's buying value stocks, which is what we're doing. But we're losing money. We're losing clients. All of a sudden he goes on this tear. He's up fifty percent. It's uncanny. He's uncanny. And we're not the only ones watching it."

  Mike Burry couldn't see exactly who was following his financial moves, but he could tell which domains they came from. In the beginning his readers came from EarthLink and AOL. Just random individuals. Pretty soon, however, they weren't. People were coming to his site from mutual funds like Fidelity and big Wall Street investment banks like Morgan Stanley. One day he lit into Vanguard's index funds and almost instantly received a cease and desist order from Vanguard's attorneys. Burry suspected that serious investors might even be acting on his blog posts, but he had no clear idea who they might be. "The market found him," says the Philadelphia mutual fund manager. "He was recognizing patterns no one else was seeing."

  By the time Burry moved to Stanford Hospital in 1998 to take up his residency in neurology, the work he had done between midnight and three in the morning had made him a minor but meaningful hub in the land of value investing. By this time the craze for Internet stocks was completely out of control and had infected the Stanford University medical community. "The residents in particular, and some of the faculty, were captivated by the dot-com bubble," said Burry. "A decent minority of them were buying and discussing everything--Polycom, Corel, Razorfish, Pets.com, TIBCO, Microsoft, Dell, Intel are the ones I specifically remember, but areyoukiddingme-dot-com was how my brain filtered a lot of it.... I would just keep my mouth shut, because I didn't want anybody there knowing what I was doing on the side. I felt I could get in big trouble if the doctors there saw I wasn't one hundred and ten percent committed to medicine."

  People who worry about seeming sufficiently committed to medicine probably aren't sufficiently committed to medicine. The deeper he got into his medical career, the more Burry felt constrained by his problems with other people in the flesh. He briefly tried to hide in pathology, where the people had the decency to be dead, but that didn't work. ("Dead people, dead parts. More dead people, more dead parts. I thought, I want something more cerebral.")

  He'd moved back to San Jose, buried his father, remarried, and been misdiagnosed by experts as bipolar when he shut down his Web site and announced he was quitting neurology to become a money manager. The chairman of the Stanford Department of Neurology thought he'd lost his mind and told him to take a year to think it over, but he'd already thought it over. "I found it fascinating and seemingly true," he said, "that if I could run a portfolio well, then I could achieve success in life, and that it wouldn't matter what kind of person I was perceived to be, even though I felt I was a good person deep down." His $40,000 in assets against $145,000 in student loans posed the question of exactly what portfolio he would run. His father had died after another misdiagnosis: A doctor had failed to spot the cancer on an X-ray, and the family had received a small settlement. The father disapproved of the stock market, but the payout from his death funded his son into it. His mother was able to kick in $20,000 from her settlement, his three brothers kicked in $10,000 each of theirs. With that, Dr. Michael Burry opened Scion Capital. (As a boy he'd loved the book The Scions of Shannara.) He created a grandiose memo to lure people not related to him by blood. "The minimum net worth for investors should be $15 million," it said, which was interesting, as it excluded not only himself but basically everyone he'd ever known.

  As he scrambled to find office space, buy furniture, and open a brokerage account, he received a pair of surprising phone calls. The first came from a big investment fund in New York City, Gotham Capital. Gotham was founded by a value investment guru named Joel Greenblatt. Burry had read Greenblatt's book You Can Be a Stock Market Genius. ("I hated the title but liked the book.") Greenblatt's people told him that they had been making money off his ideas for some time and wanted to continue to do so--might Mike Burry consider allowing Gotham to invest in his fund? "Joel Greenblatt himself called and said, 'I've been waiting for you to leave medicine.'" Gotham flew Burry and his wife to New York--and it was the first time Michael Burry had flown to New York or flown first-class--and put him up in a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel.

  On his way to his meeting with Greenblatt, Burry was wracked with the anxiety that always plagued him before face-to-face encounters with people. He took some comfort in the fact that the Gotham people seemed to have read so much of what he had written. "If you read what I wrote first, and then meet me, the meeting goes fine," he said. "People who meet me who haven't read what I wrote--it almost never goes well. Even in high school it was like that--even with teachers." He was a walking blind taste test: You had to decide if you approved of him before you laid eyes on him. In this case he was at a serious disadvantage, as he had no clue how big-time money managers dressed. "He calls me the day before the meeting," says one of his e-mail friends, himself a professional money manager. "And he asks, 'What should I wear?' He didn't own a tie. He had one blue sports coat, for funerals." This was another quirk of Mike Burry's. In writing he presented himself formally, even a bit stuffily, but he dressed for the beach. Walking to Gotham's office, he panicked and ducked into a Tie Rack and bought a tie.

  He arrived at the big New York money management firm as formally attired as he had ever been in his entire life to find its partners in t-shirts and sweatpants. The exchange went something like this.

  "We'd like to give you a million dollars."

  "Excuse me?"

  "We want to buy a quarter of your new hedge fund. For a million dollars."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. We're offering a million dollars."

  "After tax!"

  Somehow Burry had it in his mind that one day he wanted to be worth a million dollars, after tax. At any rate, he'd just blurted that last bit out before he fully understood what they were after. And they gave it to him! At that moment, on the basis of what he'd written on his blog, he went from being an indebted medical student with a net worth of minus $105,000 to a millionaire with a few outstanding loans. Burry didn't know it, but it was the first time Joel Greenblatt had done such a thing. "He was just obviously this brilliant guy, and there aren't that many of them," says Greenblatt.

  Shortly after that odd encounter, he had a call from the insurance holding company White Mountains. White Mountains was run by Jack Byrne, a member of Warren Buffett's inner circle, and they had spoken to Gotham Capital. "We didn't know you were selling part of your firm," they said--and Burry explained that he didn't realize it either until a few days earlier, when someone offered a million dollars, after tax, for it. It turned out that White Mountains, too, had been watching Michael Burry closely. "What intrigued us more than anything was that he was a neurology resident," says Kip Oberting, then at White Mountains. "When the hell was he doing this?" From White Mountains he extracted $600,000 for a smaller piece of his fund, plus a promise to send him $10 million to invest. "And yes," said Oberting, "he was the only person we found on the Internet and cold-called and gave him money."

  In Dr. Mike Burry's first year in business, he grappled briefly with the social dimension of running money. "Generally you don't raise any money unless you have a good meeting with people," he said, "and generally I don't want to be around people. And people who are with me generally figure that out." He went to a conference thrown by Bank of America to introduce new fund managers to wealthy investors, and those who attended figured that out. He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by v
olatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions. "By and large," he later put it, "the wealthiest of the wealthy and their representatives have accepted that most managers are average, and the better ones are able to achieve average returns while exhibiting below-average volatility. By this logic a dollar selling for fifty cents one day, sixty cents the next day, and forty cents the next somehow becomes worth less than a dollar selling for fifty cents all three days. I would argue that the ability to buy at forty cents presents opportunity, not risk, and that the dollar is still worth a dollar." He was greeted by silence and ate lunch alone. He sat at one of the big round tables just watching the people at the other tables happily jabber away.

  When he spoke to people in the flesh, he could never tell what had put them off, his message or his person. He'd made a close study of Warren Buffett, who had somehow managed to be both wildly popular and hugely successful. Buffett had had trouble with people, too, in his youth. He'd used a Dale Carnegie course to learn how to interact more profitably with his fellow human beings. Mike Burry came of age in a different money culture. The Internet had displaced Dale Carnegie. He didn't need to meet people. He could explain himself online and wait for investors to find him. He could write up his elaborate thoughts and wait for people to read them and wire him their money to handle. "Buffett was too popular for me," said Burry. "I won't ever be a kindly grandfather figure."