🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.
Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.
He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.
Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.
Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.
Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.
But here is what Burry is flagging.
Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.
They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.
Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.
Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.
Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.
Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.
Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.
When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.
The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.
Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.
Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.
Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.
The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.
Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.
- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
@elonmusk@elonmusk destroy the western middle class for two decades. Consolidate wealth. Blame the immigrants. You are pretty quiet about @NYCMayor successes in NYC.
🚨 THE ENTIRE AI BOOM MIGHT BE BUILT ON FAKE REVENUE.
Latest corporate filings show that OpenAI and Anthropic alone make up over half of the entire $2 trillion future cloud backlog held by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon.
This massive pipeline is actually being created through a circular accounting trick called a round trip revenue loop.
But how it works ?
A tech giant gives billions of dollars to an AI startup as an "investment". But hidden in the contract is a strict rule forcing the startup to hand that exact same money straight back to the tech giant to rent their computer servers.
Look at the documented case of Microsoft and OpenAI.
When Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI, it didn't just give them cash; it gave them "cloud credits" to use Microsoft servers. OpenAI used those exact credits to train its AI models, and Microsoft then turned around and recorded that server usage as brand new "cloud revenue" from a customer.
The tech giant is literally paying itself with its own money and calling it a sale.
This is why OpenAI’s annual cloud bill has ballooned to over $60 billion, double its actual revenue of $25 billion, kept alive solely by this recycled funding loop.
Anthropic runs the exact same play, spending $2.66 billion on Amazon Web Services in just nine months, which was basically 100% of all the money it earned at the time.
This manufactured demand triggers a second accounting trick where tech giants book massive paper profits. Every time a startup gets a higher value from a new funding round, the tech giant updates the value of its investment on its books and counts that unearned paper gain as direct profit.
In Q1 2026, Alphabet reported a record $62.6 billion profit, but $28.7 billion nearly half, was just a paper markup on its Anthropic investment. In the same quarter, Amazon reported $30.3 billion in profit, but $16.8 billion of it was just an Anthropic paper gain.
While Amazon reported record profits, its actual free cash flow collapsed 95% to just $1.2 billion because it had to spend $44.2 billion in real cash to build physical data centers.
This has created a massive danger where these giant companies rely heavily on just one or two unstable startups. Microsoft has 49% of its $627 billion future backlog tied to OpenAI, while Oracle has an incredible 54% of its entire $553 billion pipeline relying on OpenAI alone.
This perfectly mirrors the 2001 dot-com crash when Global Crossing and Qwest Communications swapped identical fiber-optic network capacity with each other just to book fake sales.
Qwest had to erase $1.4 billion in fake income, and Global Crossing went completely bankrupt.
The only difference is that the dot-com swaps were illegal, but today's AI loop is fully legal under current accounting rules.
This legal loop inflates tech company stock prices, forcing automatic retirement accounts and index funds to buy even more of these tech stocks. It is a self feeding loop where investments, sales, and stock prices all go up on paper without the AI technology ever making real cash profits.