Day: November 22, 2025

• Market watchers can’t get enough of Michael Burry’s crusade against the AI giants.
• Nvidia’s stock reversal on Thursday sparked memes featuring the investor of “The Big Short” fame.
• Burry, a vocal skeptic of the AI boom, has bet against Nvidia and Palantir in recent months.

Michael Burry is officially a meme.

The investor of “The Big Short” fame is lighting up social media after he bet against Nvidia and called out the chipmaker and other AI companies on X, which may have contributed to the stock market’s slump on Thursday.

Why Michael Burry is having a moment

Burry is best known for predicting and profiting from the collapse of the mid-2000s US housing bubble. His massive, contrarian wager was immortalized in the book “The Big Short” and a movie adaptation starring Christian Bale as Burry.

Known for his dire warnings of crashes and recessions, Burry goes by “Cassandra” on X — a reference to the priestess from Greek mythology who was cursed to speak true prophecies but never to be believed.

He burst back onto X in late October after more than two years of silence, and wasted no time firing off several warnings about a dangerous bubble in AI stocks.

His hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, revealed days later that at the end of September it held bearish put options on Nvidia and Palantir with a combined notional value of $1.1 billion.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp called the bets “batshit crazy” in a televised interview, spurring Burry to fire back that the AI company’s boss couldn’t “crack a simple 13F.”

In later posts, Burry said that he wasn’t short and had exited the Palantir puts in October. He also terminated Scion’s SEC registration, closing it to outside cash.

Most recently, he took aim at Nvidia after its third-quarter earnings beat on Wednesday. He questioned the longevity of its chips, its “give-and-take deals” with other AI companies, and its stock dilution.

Some market watchers rushed to ridicule his bearish stance on the AI boom after Nvidia shares popped more than 5% following its earnings beat.

Other commenters poked fun at Burry’s defiance, and his willingness to go up against technology titans and the dominant market narrative.

Still others have defended Burry, saying he’s many things but foolish isn’t one of them.

Shares of Nvidia opened higher on Thursday but swung to a 3% decline by the market’s close, and fell another 1% on Friday.

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable public company with a market capitalization above $4 trillion, so its sudden downswing dragged the entire stock market lower on Thursday.

The S&P 500 gave up a 1.9% gain to close 1.6% lower, while the Nasdaq Composite went from a 2.6% rise to a 2.2% fall, marking the indexes’ largest intraday swing since April. Both closed less than 1% higher on Friday.

The reversal led some market watchers to rally behind Burry, celebrating his surprise comeback and suggesting he may have been right to be skeptical.

They also gave him kudos for cashing in on the chaos, even though Burry hasn’t said whether he holds Nvidia puts or profited from Thursday’s selloff.

Burry also received praise for his Palantir bet, as the AI stock has tanked 25% since November 3, when it reported earnings and Burry disclosed his puts.

By no means was Burry solely responsible for the market slump. Investors also soured on Nvidia after analysts flagged increases in inventories and deferred revenues, raising concerns the company’s growth may have been frontloaded and could slow in future quarters. Moreover, delayed economic data showed US unemployment rose to an almost four-year high of 4.4% in September.

Burry is yet to post about the online furor surrounding his crusade against the AI giants. But his followers may hear more from him very soon, as his X bio reads: “‘Unchained’ coming maybe sooner than Nov 25th.”

• Staying active with daily walks may help prevent symptoms of Alzheimer’s as you age, research suggests.
• Cognitive decline and memory loss happen as we age if certain proteins build up in the brain.
• Walking just 3,000 – 5,000 steps a day helps to stave off these toxins and keep the brain healthy.

Every weekday afternoon, Harvard neurologist Jasmeer Chhatwal gets up from his desk, heads out of the office, and walks about three-quarters of a mile to get a cup of coffee from a neighborhood cafe.

There’s a perfectly good coffee maker in the office, but the afternoon ritual isn’t (just) about caffeine. The 20-minute stroll is helping to stave off symptoms of brain aging like memory loss, according to Chhatwal’s research.

His latest study, published November 3 in Nature Medicine, helps pinpoint how little movement you can get away with and still see benefits for the brain.

The goal? 5,000 steps a day — around two miles.

“People don’t need to run marathons,” Chhatwal told Business Insider. “In terms of things that you can do for yourself and your brain, this is a pretty easy one.”

Here’s why walking may help to make your mind more resilient to aging, and how to get the most out of your daily steps.

Why walking is linked to better brain health

Your risk of cognitive decline as you age can be influenced by your lifestyle, your genetics, and even the environment around you.

But increasingly, researchers are finding that a higher risk doesn’t make Alzheimer’s inevitable — and small lifestyle changes may have a huge impact.

The latest study, led by Chhatwal and colleagues from Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham, looked at nearly 300 cognitively healthy adults between the ages of 50 and 90.

To understand how their brains changed over time, the researchers scanned for key markers of Alzheimer’s risk, including deposits of amyloid and tau proteins, which can accumulate over time and disrupt nerve cells.

Amyloid tends to show up in the brain first, sometimes many years before symptoms develop. Tau, which appears later, has been linked to the development of memory loss, behavioral changes, and cognitive decline.

Using brain scans, they found that people who got between 5,000 and 7,000 steps a day had a healthier, better-functioning brain over time, and a slower build-up of disease-causing tau protein, compared with people who were more sedentary.

That was true even for people who started the study with higher levels of amyloid plaque build-up in their brains already.

For this high-risk group, even a little activity paid off, with benefits starting around 3,000 steps per day (roughly a mile and a quarter).

While previous research has linked exercise to lower Alzheimer’s risk, this study stands out because it followed participants for up to 14 years to see how changes in their brains slowly developed.

Chhatwal is excited to move this research along, to refine the benefits even more — especially for people who are at high risk for Alzheimer’s.

But, for now, he is keen to spread the word that this study suggests it’s not too late to get more active for a healthier brain, and every little bit counts.

• Trump has proposed sending $2,000 tariff checks to Americans in mid-2026.
• He’s got a lot of work to do to convince his allies in Congress to go along with it.
• Many Republicans would prefer to see any tariff revenue used to reduce the national debt.

President Donald Trump wants to send $2,000 tariff checks to Americans next year.

But to do that, he’ll have to get Congress to go along with it — and even some of his top allies are skeptical.

“We’re facing a deficit this year around $2 trillion,” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters. “I think whatever revenue we get, from whatever source, ought to go to try and bring down those deficits.”

Trump’s proposed tariff checks have received a cool response from most Republicans on Capitol Hill, with many saying they’d prefer to see the national debt addressed first.

That’s a big problem for Trump, considering it takes an act of Congress to actually send the checks.

Even those who aren’t outright rejecting the proposal — it’s always risky to oppose Trump as a Republican — are politely signaling that they’d prefer a different path.

“I mean, everybody’s got their own idea,” Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona told BI. “I would prefer we reduce the overall tax rate, and make that permanent.”

“You know, my focus would clearly be paying down the $38 trillion of the debt,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida told Business Insider. “But I have to see what he proposes.”

Trump’s getting more specific — but lawmakers aren’t budging

Throughout the first year of his second term, Trump has at times flirted with the idea of sending checks to Americans. It began in February, when Trump said that “DOGE Dividends,” checks paid for by purported DOGE savings, were “under consideration.” The tariff rebate talk picked up in August, when Trump embraced the idea, seemingly in response to a question from a reporter.

“We’re thinking about that, actually,” Trump said at the time.

The president in recent weeks has begun to speak more seriously about the idea, bringing it up multiple times in public remarks and Truth Social posts. On Monday, he said he was eyeing a rollout in mid-2026. And in calling for $2,000 checks, he’s gotten more specific than before.

That’s all been music to Sen. Josh Hawley’s ears, who introduced a bill to send a tariff rebate to lower-income Americans in August.

“This is my pet idea,” the Missouri Republican told reporters on Wednesday. “I just think it’s a terrific way to give relief to working people.”

And other Republicans have been forced to soften their opposition. In February, when asked about potential DOGE dividends, House Speaker Mike Johnson was relatively firm in saying he preferred to see the national debt reduced.

This month, he’s struck a slightly more conciliatory tone.

“Well, I think there’s some merit to it,” Johnson said on Fox Business earlier this month. “I mean, we’ll have to figure that out.”

“The discussion would be: If you have trillions of dollars in new revenue, what’s the best use for it?” Johnson continued. “Should you pay down the debt? Because that saves families a lot of money in the long run and puts us back on a sound fiscal trajectory.”

Still, plenty of other Republicans are holding firm. In July, when Trump was merely floating the idea, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio told reporters that the proposal would “never pass” given the soaring national debt.

On Wednesday, he reiterated his opposition.

“I think we should pay down the deficit,” Moreno told Business Insider.

‘There are ways that they could maybe spin this’

Aside from the politics of it all, there are more basic problems with Trump’s proposal.

First, there’s the math: Several independent analyses of the proposal have found that there’s not nearly enough tariff revenue to fund Trump’s plan.

An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that the program could cost $600 billion — about double the $300 billion in projected annual tariff revenue. And that’s assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t strike down any of Trump’s tariffs.

There’s also the fact that stimulus checks are likely to be inflationary.

That’s a pill that Republicans in particular are unlikely to want to swallow, according to Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“Republicans have spent five years railing against the Biden administration for cutting people checks and sparking inflation,” Lincicome told Business Insider. “Now in power, they’re going to start cutting people checks and maybe sparking inflation?”

Still, Lincicome predicted that Republicans might try to find other ways to satisfy Trump’s demand, including by simply rebranding tax refunds that Americans are expected to receive as a result of the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

“There are ways that they could maybe spin this,” Lincicome said. “You know, have a big press conference and some really nice poster board, that makes it look like they’re actually giving people tariff rebates, when in reality, it’s just One Big Beautiful Bill tax cuts.”

• Dagobert Renouf funded his wedding by selling company logo spots on his suit.
• His creative approach gained support from his entrepreneur community and social media followers.
• Renouf’s unique suit led to a discussion with a fellow founder and, ultimately, a new job.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with entrepreneur Dagobert Renouf, 36, who lives in Lille, France, and now works in tech sales at the startup Comp AI. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I was an entrepreneur for seven years, bootstrapping businesses. That means not getting any funding. I had some good moments and some struggles. Over the summer, I launched a solo startup, and it wasn’t going very well. I was running out of money.

Almost two years ago, I met my now wife. She’s Russian and I live in France. We wanted to live together. Because of visa issues, we wanted to accelerate the wedding. I could absolutely not afford any kind of wedding because of the business situation, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give up on either dream — of building my startup or on the wedding.

I have a community on social media talking about my journey as an entrepreneur. So I posted something like, “I have to find a way to pay for my wedding. No idea how I’m going to do it.”

I said the minimum wedding I can do is going to be 4,000 euros. A friend of mine who’s a famous entrepreneur in our community said, “I’m going to loan you the 4,000, but you don’t have to pay me back if you can’t. I just want to support you.” Then somebody joked, “If you really need help for your wedding, you just put my logo on your suit.” Because it’s an entrepreneur community, everybody wants to promote themselves. That’s what we do.

After all these years in business, I’m like, “You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone. You try crazy shit if you want to make it.” So I said, “Let’s do it.” I posted on X, and then dozens of people were like, “Yeah, I want to put my logo on your suit.”

How my fiancée felt

When I told my fiancée, she hated it. All she saw was the reaction on X — people joking, making fun of it. What made her come around, and what was making this whole thing beautiful, was when I really connected it to the fact that it was a way to bring my community to our wedding. She said, “OK, we can do it, but only if it’s nice companies that you love, mostly indie companies — people you know.”

I had to convince people that she loved it. So, it became way harder than I thought to sell it. On average, I sold spots on my suit for 300 euros. I ended up selling about 10,000 euros’ worth.

Once I started doing the suit, then I’m like, “OK, now I want it to look good. I don’t want to look like an idiot.” I have a friend who’s a stylist — a very talented guy, but very expensive. He was like, “It’s going to be like 5,000 euros, but I can do this.”

We had the final list of logos at the end of August, and the wedding was in October. At first, he wanted to print everything on the suit, but that takes more time because you need prototypes. So we ended up having to do embroidery. The suit is high quality and very beautiful. When you look at it in person, it doesn’t look like a joke. Our family and friends loved it.

The fun thing is, out of the 26 entrepreneurs who supported it, I know almost all of them. A lot of them told me something like, “Just keep the money, but don’t put it on your suit. I just want to support you.” It was like a wedding gift between entrepreneurs.

I was like, “No, I want to do the suit. We love it.”

Landing a new job

It’s the most basic thing that we hear all the time as entrepreneurs: At first, they think you’re crazy, and then it seems obvious. For the first time as an entrepreneur, I had this experience.

I really had to fight for this. It took months of me posting on social media about it. Every time, half of the people were like, “This is so bad. This is disgusting.” I feel like sometimes I was the only one to see the beauty. That’s because, for me, entrepreneurship is my life. There’s nothing on the suit I don’t like. I can almost see the face of every founder associated with their company.

I wanted to do right by all the people who supported me. They helped me get to where I’m at now. Because I felt like I owed them something, I was actually quite stressed — more stressed than my wife — during the wedding because I was always like, “I need to make sure these logos are visible.”

I joked with a friend who was beating himself up because he missed putting his logo on the suit, “Don’t worry, you can have dibs on the baby crib.” My wife wasn’t on board with that.

One of the people who replied to my posts about the suit was the cofounder of Comp AI. We were only acquaintances, but he kept replying to my posts, saying to put his company’s logo on my suit.

At the same time, I realized that I can do sales, and he said, “Let’s get you a sales job.” That was completely unexpected. I was an entrepreneur for years, and I couldn’t see any other way of living. Without the suit, I would have never gotten this job.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.