Michael Burry joins Minerva Investment Management as senior advisor
The investor who famously bet against the housing market before the 2008 crisis is back, this time advising a short-biased fund built by the Unicus Research team.
Michael Burry, the investor immortalized in “The Big Short” for calling the 2008 housing collapse before almost anyone else, has taken on the role of senior advisor at Minerva Investment Management. The new short-biased hedge fund is led by Lakshmi Ganapathi and her team at Unicus Research, a credit analysis and short-selling firm that has been quietly building a reputation with institutional clients since around 2020.
For anyone keeping score at home, Burry closed Scion Asset Management in November 2025, which had been managing roughly $155 million earlier that year. His move to Minerva suggests he’s not retiring so much as changing the vehicle.
What Minerva is building
Minerva Investment Management is being positioned as a dedicated short-biased fund, meaning it will primarily bet on stocks going down rather than up. Unicus Research, the team behind Minerva, reportedly began planning the fund earlier in 2026, driven by demand from large allocators looking for ways to hedge against potential market downturns.
The numbers backing Unicus are noteworthy. Since its founding around 2020, the firm has issued 59 short recommendations to investors. All but six of those were reportedly profitable.
Ganapathi’s team has focused on credit analysis and identifying overvalued or fundamentally impaired companies, a style that aligns naturally with Burry’s own approach to markets.
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Why Burry’s track record matters here
Burry’s bet against the US housing market before the 2008 crisis reportedly generated $100 million for himself and $700 million for his investors at Scion Capital.
More recently, Burry has been active in shorting AI-related stocks. He took notable positions against companies like Palantir and Nvidia, betting that valuations in the artificial intelligence sector had gotten ahead of fundamentals.
His role at Minerva is advisory rather than managerial. He won’t be running day-to-day operations or making final trading decisions. Instead, he’ll bring his experience in value investing and contrarian positioning to help shape the fund’s strategic direction.
The fund’s size and specific strategy details haven’t been disclosed. What is clear is that Minerva represents a bet, not just on individual stocks going down, but on the idea that the market broadly needs more skepticism than it currently has.