Michael Burry just told two of the biggest companies in the world that they’re falling behind

Michael Burry is not the kind of person who gives free advice.

In 2005, when every bank on Wall Street was celebrating the housing boom, he was quietly buying credit default swaps against mortgage-backed securities. Everyone laughed. Then the market collapsed, and he walked away with $800 million in profits for his fund. The movie made him famous. The instinct was always there.

So, Burry posted on X two suggesting Apple to buy Anthropic and Adobe to buy Midjourney, even though he later deleted the posts, the advice can change the fortunes of these companies.

Apple is sitting on a mountain of cash and doing very little with it

Here is the uncomfortable truth about Apple in 2026. While Google is planning to spend $175 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Meta has committed $115 – $135 billion, and Microsoft is pouring money into data centres faster than it can build them, Apple spent $12.7 billion on capital expenditure in all of fiscal 2025. That is less than what some of its rivals are spending in a single quarter.

Adobe is being treated like a dying company. Its financials disagree

Adobe’s stock is down roughly 37% in last one year when the broader market rose nearly 17%. On paper, that looks like a company being destroyed by the AI wave. Canva has $4 billion in annual recurring revenue growing at 35% and a $42 billion valuation. Figma is rebuilding after its failed sale. A wave of free, high-quality AI image tools is eroding the justification for expensive Creative Cloud subscriptions.

The narrative writes itself. Adobe is the next Kodak. The next Blockbuster. The next company that built a dominant franchise and then watched a technology shift make it irrelevant.

Except the actual business tells a completely different story.

Adobe reported full-year 2025 revenue of $23.77 billion, up 11% year on year. Its Firefly AI models have generated 29 billion content outputs. Acrobat AI Assistant saw engagement spike 50% quarter on quarter. The company generates more than $10 billion in annual operating cash flow and as per yahoo finance, it trades at roughly 11.96 times forward earnings. For context, that is close to the valuation of a slow-growth industrial company, not a software business with 70% gross margins and near-total dominance in professional creative tools.

Burry’s suggestion to buy Midjourney is, at its core, a signal-sending exercise.

Midjourney is bootstrapped, founder-led, and has no outside investors, which means any acquisition would require convincing the founder rather than negotiating with a board. But what Adobe would be buying is not just a product. It would be buying credibility in generative AI, the one area where the market believes Adobe is weakest.

Adobe already offers commercially safe, copyright-indemnified AI through Firefly, something enterprise clients require and Midjourney historically has not. Combining Midjourney’s visual quality with Adobe’s enterprise infrastructure and distribution could produce something no free tool can replicate.

Adobe’s Premiere Pro still holds an estimated 35 to 40 percent market share in professional video editing. Its Digital Experience segment generated $5.4 billion in fiscal 2025 at roughly 72% gross margins. This is not a company in structural decline. It is a company the market has decided to price like one, and those two things are very different problems with very different solutions.

Why Burry, of all people, is saying this

Here is the part that makes this interesting. Burry has spent the last two years warning that AI is a bubble. He has shorted Nvidia. He has called out the circular capital flows where Big Tech funds startups that return the money as cloud credits, making revenues look bigger than they are. He is not an AI optimist.

So when he tells two companies to go deeper into AI, he is not cheerleading the sector. He is identifying companies whose existing franchises are at risk and whose cash positions give them the rare ability to do something about it. He is not saying AI is a good investment. He is saying that for Apple and Adobe specifically, not investing is the riskier bet.

Tesla, by contrast, gets no such sympathy. Burry this week reiterated that Tesla shares are at least four times overvalued, with a trailing price to earnings ratio of 375, compared to 37 for Nvidia. His suggestion for Elon Musk was characteristically blunt: sell the Tesla shares, put them in an index fund, and move on.

The man who shorted the housing market is not suddenly bullish on everything. He is just looking at two very specific companies, with very specific problems, and very specific amounts of cash, and concluding that the window to act is shorter than either of them seems to realise. He has been early before. He has also been right.

Sonia Boolchandani is a seasoned financial writer She has written for prominent firms like Vested Finance, and Finology, where she has crafted content that simplifies complex financial concepts for diverse audiences.

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