Michael Burry hasn’t been “in sync with the markets” for quite “some time.”

That’s according to… well, let me be careful. Better safe than sorry. That’s according to a letter circulated on social media Thursday. It was shared (or reposted) by some of the most reputable names in the financial media, including Lisa Abramowicz.

I can’t pick up the phone and call Michael to verify its authenticity, but I assume it’ll be confirmed by the time you read this, or shortly thereafter. It showed up around the same time Burry posted a screenshot of Scion Asset Management’s SEC registration status, which now lists as “terminated.”

Unless Burry now has less than $100 million in AUM, the decision to deregister the fund almost surely means he’s closing it altogether or at least to outside investors.

So the rumor mill was forgiven for accepting the letter mentioned above as authentic until proven otherwise. In it, Burry says he’s liquidating and returning money to investors.

The news was met with a deluge of derision from the peanut gallery. The tomato-throwing and jeers were brutal. (“Go home bear!” “Get off the stage!”) I have to admit, I agree with most of the criticism, and also with the notion that it was (well past) time for Burry to hang it up.

As discussed here in “Michael Burry, The Hyper-Scalers And A $176 Billion ‘Fraud’,” Burry’s spent the last 18 years chasing the dragon, which is to say chasing the high from the grandaddy of all shorts.

The subprime crisis was indeed “the big one, Elizabeth,” to quote Redd Foxx, but almost by definition it was a one-off. In trying to replicate it, Burry was chasing the unattainable.

He’s got it in for the AI hyper-scalers now, and he’s still teasing some manner of big unveil on November 25, but by appearances, he’ll be traveling that road alone.

Invariably, bears will say this is evidence that he’s right. That it’s just when people like Burry tap out that the top’s upon us. That we saw this in the lead-up to the dot-com bust. And so on.

I won’t argue with any of that, but I will argue (right along side the peanut gallery) that Burry was never a great investor, nor even an especially good one. He was just an eccentric whose personal peculiarities helped him ferret out history’s greatest short and, just as importantly, gave him the temerity to put it on.

In the final analysis, Burry was a one hit wonder. That’s the end of this story. The long and the short of it, if you like.