“The Big Short” investor argued that the expected surge in AI traffic may be a “low bar” and questioned who will ultimately pay for the AI.
- Cloudflare predicts that machine-generated Internet traffic will surpass that generated by humans by 1,000 times in five years.
- Burry turned the discussion to AI investment and returns.
- SPCX stock notched a 23% weekly gain, and retail sentiment turned ‘bullish.’
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been touting an explosion in internet traffic driven by AI, and investor Michael Burry seized on those comments to turn the discussion to his favorite subject: whether AI investments are sustainable.
Burry, known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, which was depicted in the movie “The Big Short,” argued that the expected surge in AI traffic may be a “low bar” and questioned who will ultimately pay for the AI.
“AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all,” Musk said in an X post, sharing an excerpt from a new Cloudflare study that said bot traffic could exceed human traffic by a factor of 1,000 within five years. “Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate.”
Cloudflare previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027, but that happened earlier than expected in May 2026.
“In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow,” Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert said in a new report, according to The Register.
Burry’s Positions Around AI
In response to Musk’s post, Burry wrote: “This is a lower bar than most think, and we still do not know who will pay for AI agents to socialize.”
Burry has continued to position against what he sees as an AI bubble, arguing that today’s AI infrastructure boom could eventually lead to excess capacity.
Since late 2025, he has built or expanded bearish positions in Nvidia, Palantir, Caterpillar, Applied Materials, Micron, Oracle, and Nebius. Last week, he exited his Microsoft long position amid a series of trades.
Five of the biggest U.S. tech companies – Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Oracle – will spend about $800 billion in combined capital expenditures this year, according to the latest projections from their second-quarter results issued recently.
A majority of that spending will flow into AI development and new data centers, even as some pockets of the market remain skeptical about the returns on those investments and the durability of certain stock prices, particularly among semiconductor companies.
Musk’s Starlink Push
In separate posts on the weekend, Musk said Starlink’s V3 rollout could deliver more than 100 times the bandwidth of the current V2 system, while the company’s total constellation could eventually grow to more than 100,000 from the roughly 10,000 satellites currently in orbit.
“Yes, I expect the Starlink total constellation size, inclusive of direct-to-cell, to exceed 100k. Future versions of our satellites may exceed 50X the throughput of a V2, making the total system bandwidth even higher,” Musk said in the X post.
The remarks come as SpaceX steps up efforts to deploy its next-generation Starlink constellation. The company conducted the first Starship V3 test flight from its Texas Starbase facility, followed by the Flight 13 launch last month, which marked the deployment of the first next-generation Starlink V3 satellites.
Meanwhile, Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management has been loading up on SpaceX shares. The asset manager added 114,815 shares in SpaceX on Friday.
SpaceX stock rose 23% this week and is inching closer to its IPO price of $135 following declines after its listing on June 12. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for SPCX was ‘bullish’ on Sunday.
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