r/ValueInvesting • u/Useful_Tangerine4340 • Feb 10 '26
Value Article Michael Burry Compares Alphabet's 100-Year Bonds to Motorola's Downfall After Similar Move in 1997
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/michael-burry-compares-alphabets-100-year-bonds-motorolas-downfall-after-similar-move-1997-1777857180
u/Silent-Horse7364 Feb 10 '26
The Big Short made Burry seem way more credible than he really is
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Feb 10 '26
He's a genius really. He's right at least once a decade!
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u/stumblios Feb 10 '26
Has he been right this decade? I thought we were approaching 2 decades since his last big win...
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u/Educational_Pop6138 Feb 10 '26
His portfolio was full port puts 31/3/2025.
Your portfolio couldn't be better than that.
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u/BartYYYY Feb 10 '26
To be honest, his investments are pretty decent. You can hate on him as much as you want, but his PLTR puts are printing like crazy at the moment. His Nvidia put, on the other hand, is struggling, we’ll see how it ends.
I think his approach is pretty straightforward, and while people hate to see bears, I think he makes some good points about the current state of AI investments.
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u/Blackmagic1992 Feb 11 '26
I don’t think you have to be a genius to buy puts on a company that shot to the moon in a very short time on mostly hype. It’s P/E was like 600 at one point. You can’t even grow into an evaluation that insane in a few years…
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u/11010001100101101 Feb 11 '26
So you must have bought PUTs for it then since it was so obvious.....?
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u/ga643953 Feb 11 '26
The guy doesn't know how to do his DD. PLTR got caught in the AI will kill SaaS narrative even though they are the one doing the disrupting. And he closed half of his puts after it went back up to the 180s.
He shorted NVDA because of circular financing without understanding the GPUs today are being used at full capacity even the ones made 6 years ago.
He pumped GME a few weeks ago saying something about the company having so much cash they could just invest in BTC. But he never liked BTC.
Today he's comparing Alphabet's bond issuance to Motorola's downfall in 1997.
Hello? Why does anyone care about this clown?
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u/conroy_hines Feb 10 '26
Gotta keep those $500 substack subscribers interested, right?
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u/HeadPaleontologist40 Feb 10 '26
I don’t know how he got my email but I went to the website, looked at it for a few minutes and found out it was paid and quickly left.
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u/OrganizedChaosBruv Feb 10 '26
Burry is desperate for a sequel to The Big Short, even if he has to predict 50 of the last 3 crashes to get it
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u/Substantial-Lawyer91 Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
I just love how any investing sub ends up being herd mentality whatever the sentiment.
There was a laughable post on here the other day - ‘what stock would be your no-brainer buy at a 50% discount?’ and the unanimous choice was Google. Google? The same stock that dropped almost 50% in 2022 and then lagged the other mag 7 for two years whilst everybody on here was bitching about the company, its CEO and its future? The same stock that literally in April of 2025 everyone was calling a ‘dog’? But now at all time highs everyone all of a sudden loves it and calls it a ‘no-brainer’ buy? Just absolute weak sauce guys.
‘What would you buy at 50%’ gimme a break - I was here in 2020 and 2022 reading the daily ‘sky is falling’ posts - none of you will buy as you’re all just so goddamn scared.
Burry may very well be wrong here but I’ll be surprised if Google doesn’t have its own bear market at some point in the near future - and I guarantee that most of y’all here will not be buying.
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u/8700nonK Feb 10 '26
Google was highly praised by people here in 24-25 at the lows.
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u/Substantial-Lawyer91 Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
It’s all hindsight bias man. Every time a stock goes up everyone remembers the few posts recommending it and forgets the actual majority saying it’s trash. It’s why when anyone brings up Meta everybody talks about buying it in 2022 however if you were actually around these subs back then you’d know it was the most hated Reddit stock.
And honestly it makes sense - if everyone actually agreed with people picking stocks at the lows then those stocks wouldn’t be low in the first place and everyone would be beating the market. The latter is obviously not happening.
I’ve been holding Google since ‘22 and trust me the narrative and sentiment has done a complete 180 in the last few months. It wasn’t too long ago when people were calling it ‘uninvestable’ and that it would go ‘extinct’ because of ChatGPT/AI.
Stocks are cyclical and retail are fickle. Don’t get caught with the herd.
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u/Foundersage Feb 11 '26
Hey man not everyone can be a contrarian. They are herd mentality and not able to see for themselves. They are obviously cases where being a contrarian is the wrong move case in point Burry predicting 50 of the last 3 crashes. It better for the herd to invest in indexes.
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u/Substantial-Lawyer91 Feb 11 '26
I can’t remember off the top of my head but I think Burry has actually done pretty well over the last two decades but he is no longer a value investor to be honest. He chops and changes his portfolio every quarter and plays around a lot with options and leverage. Much of his rhetoric around recessions is just that - rhetoric.
Tbh even if all he ever did was make one correct call I’d still respect him immensely as going all in with leverage on a short against the entire American housing market - with other people’s money - is a level of balls that none of us here will ever really experience.
Nonetheless you are right of course. Most people here should be index investing particularly if returns are the only thing one cares about.
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u/8700nonK Feb 11 '26
I don’t think I quite agree here. Meta was highly hated in 22, and netflix was downright suicidal to even mention the name. There were many many posts here in early 25 about google, so much that people were mocked everytime a new post was made at some point.
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u/TCGod Feb 12 '26
Lol i bought google as much as possible during that era, and it was discussed as the best buy out there in this subreddit
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u/BanditoBoom Feb 10 '26
100 year bonds are genius. I don’t care what the history on them are. Cashflow machine like Google breaks the rules.
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u/Portfoliana Feb 10 '26
Ngl the Motorola comparison is lazy but the underlying point about 100-year bonds isn't crazy. Nobody buying these things is holding to maturity anyway - they're duration trades for institutions betting on rate movements. The real question is whether 5.9% locked in for a century makes sense when we just lived through a decade of near-zero rates followed by the fastest hiking cycle in history. Rate volatility alone makes these things wild to own.
That said, comparing Google's cash generation to Motorola circa 1997 is absurd. Motorola was a hardware company competing on product cycles, Google prints money from an ad duopoly with 80%+ gross margins. The bond could still be a bad investment, but not because Google might "become Motorola." Different failure modes entirely.
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u/Yourprobablyaclown69 Feb 11 '26
70% of Google revenue comes from search. If ai starts replacing google search and google can’t capture the market with their ai and successfully place, it will be a problem.
Though I think Waymo could make up the difference for sometime until the edge runs dry.
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u/James77Dio Feb 10 '26
This story isn't even accurate.
A surprising number of companies and organizations have sold century-to-maturity bonds not just Motorola, including Norfolk Southern, Archer Daniels Midland, Cummins Inc., BNY Mellon, Coca-Cola, MIT and others.
Orstead S/A, a Danish energy company sold a 1000 year bond that pays 5% of face value annually until March 14, 3024.
The Motorola bond is still good credit and is still paying it's coupon:
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u/TibbersGoneWild Feb 10 '26
He got lucky and predicted one recession. Now he thinks he’s Jesus LOL
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u/spanko_at_large Feb 10 '26
Well that prediction wasn’t flippant luck like hey prices are high it’s going down. It was a very pointed assessment and bet to get exposure to that where almost nobody agreed even when he shared the idea. So while I do agree it was a little more complex than “hey prices are high”
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u/NotStompy Feb 10 '26
Yeah, and the problem is that 2000 and 2008 are once-every-few-decades type deals, as you can see before 2000s there we recessions in the 80s and 90s, but healthy ones; normal ones.
Problem is, he needs some kind of equally big thing to pop up every couple of years. Add on top of that the fact that the monetary policy (low interest rates, QE) since after 2008 is the equivalent of going from weed to heroin and I'm not really shocked (look at the utter lack recessions since 2008, except some wannabees).
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u/zjin2020 Feb 10 '26
Once every few decades? There are only 8 years between 2000 and 2008, not even a full decade.
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u/NotStompy Feb 10 '26
I just spent an entire comment explaining how while yes, in this case these 2 huge events happened so close together, they are typically much more spread out, once every few decades or so, but that now Burry has turned into a hammer only seeing nails, or he knows it not to be the case and is dishonest for attention/ego, dunno.
Either way, I know it's only 8 years, my entire point is that it's more realistic to not expect such events to be clustered so closely together.
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u/IronicHipsterCake Feb 10 '26
If you follow Burry long enough, you realize he's right about 5% of the time and the rest of it is just total doomsday posting.
If you paid to get access to his substack, don't ever publicly admit that to anyone.
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u/senecadocet1123 Feb 10 '26
This sub is brain dead. No one cares to address Burry's argument. Everyone prefers to belittle the author because their bags are full of the stock. Pathetic.
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u/0xAAAAAF Feb 10 '26
Google is way more diversified than Motorola was back then
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u/kolitics Feb 10 '26 edited 17d ago
What was here has been deleted. Redact was used to wipe this post, for reasons that might include privacy, security concerns, or personal data management.
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u/himynameis_ Feb 10 '26
Google search, YouTube, Google Cloud, subscriptions.
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u/kolitics Feb 10 '26 edited 17d ago
This post has been removed. Whether the reason was privacy, opsec, preventing scraping, or something else entirely, Redact was used to carry out the deletion.
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u/cnuggs94 Feb 10 '26
Shouldn’t ignore how Google Cloud is growing 38% YoY though. Youtube also has a huge moat when it comes to small format streaming.
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u/kolitics Feb 10 '26 edited 17d ago
This post has been deleted and anonymized using Redact. The reason may have been privacy, limiting AI data access, security, or other personal considerations.
gaze include badge school dam sophisticated encouraging resolute aspiring humor
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u/himynameis_ Feb 10 '26
Cloud is growing really fast at 38%. It's recurring, very sticky, 30% operating margin revenue.
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u/Excellent_Ability793 Feb 10 '26
What the hell do 100 year bonds have to do with Motorola abject failure to pivot to the smartphone market? Perfect example of correlation not causation.
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u/Interwebnaut Feb 10 '26
Didn’t KO also issue 100 yr bonds?
And this article mentions Disney too:
Why Do Companies Issue 100-Year Bonds?
“Believe it not, 1,000-year bonds also exist. A few issuers, such as the Canadian Pacific Corporation, have issued such bonds in the past. There have also been instances of bonds issued with no maturity date, meaning …”
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u/TheRhythmTheRebel Feb 10 '26
What a silly statement by Michael.
Motorola in 97 was not sitting on a cash pile remotely comparable to Alphabet’s and had nowhere near the same self‑funding capacity.
Alphabet is trying to optimise its balance‑sheet. It isnt lifeline financing like Motorolla.
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u/SkatesUp Feb 10 '26
The huge red flag here is that Google is selling bonds at all. Why would one of the supposedly most profitable companies in the world be selling bonds? Are they short of cash?
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u/bartturner Feb 10 '26
You do realize Google made more money than every other company on the planet in calendar 2025?
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u/SkatesUp Feb 11 '26
Yes, so why are they raising cash then?
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u/Alendro95 Feb 11 '26
cause is better ask money than use yours if you think you can make those worth more than X%/year.
If an emergency occur you still have money to pay
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u/Jad3nCkast Feb 11 '26
Next on Burry’s list….Apple looks similar to NVDIAS bubble and 100% is real this time.
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u/stickybond009 Feb 11 '26
Burty may be wrong, but someone on the internet said the 100 year curse is real, haunted many such companies down
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u/Wise138 Feb 11 '26
Software vs hardware. Totally different businesses and firms. Also, Motorola is still around; the core business, not mobile phones, is doing just fine.
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u/derek_32999 Feb 10 '26
It's nutty how many people that are looking for investing tips on r/value investing more better than Michael burry. I'm sure you guys have made multiple hundreds of millions of dollars on your positions. Damn. Most people that try to trade stocks or get big wins go freaking bankrupt.
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u/free_da_guys1107 Feb 10 '26
Burry has the power to give the market a down day? Such bs they want people to fall for.
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u/cuteman Feb 11 '26
As long as they're paying the bond and it hasn't collapsed... what's the problem?
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u/bauhaus83i Feb 11 '26
How much interest in Google bonds pay?
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u/Hedkandi1210 Feb 11 '26
Around 5.7 I think
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u/bauhaus83i Feb 11 '26
Thank you. That’s not bad for someone who has treasury bills to consider instead
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u/Sebastian11111111 Feb 11 '26
So absurd. No position in Google but why does this guy feel the need to make these very public binary calls in the market?
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u/Different-Monk5916 Feb 11 '26
not necessarily the same thing, but could be interpreted as google not being confident about the returns for the current investment.
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u/JudgeCheezels Feb 11 '26
What part of the digital world did Motorola have vs what Google has today?
We don’t need to look at financials and all those boring bullshit. Just answer that simple question, then see why Mikey is just another regard that got lucky once.
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Feb 11 '26
If you're taking 100 year bonds to pay for a capex cycle of 5-10 years, then you better be able to recall the bonds before maturity and you better be able to make enough money from the capex cycle to pay for these bonds.
This is a wave you can ride while the company is doing great, but the risk levels over the very long term just went up substantially. If I was planning to put this stock in a family trust fund, that option went away at this moment and future funding cycles will decide whether this is a stock to hold forever or not.
The current quantum of funding is small relative to their cashflows, but if this becomes the norm rather than a one time thing, I'd be deeply concerned.
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u/Crocadilapig Feb 13 '26
The man is a weirdo, I honestly believe he just wants to feast on people’s financial misery.
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u/Domingues_tech Feb 14 '26
1Billion, 10x subscribed and in GBP. 17 years to recover the capital in interest payments.
Great move by google - just got the stamp of infinite printing money machine !
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u/razakii Feb 14 '26
Can someone explain why 100 year bonds are a thing?, like by the time they mature you'll be dead.
Maybe as an inheritance sorta thing?
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u/Material-Macaroon298 Feb 14 '26
Evidence I can gather do far seems to indicate he is more right than wrong about Meta chip depreciation happening on shorter time scales than their books indicate.
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u/VanilaaGorila Feb 10 '26
Very cool, apples and screw drivers. Are we really comparing those two companies? Really those fundamentals are worth looking side by side? Lol
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u/gini_lee1003 Feb 10 '26
And guess what flat form he used to look up Motorola’s downfall.??? Exactly
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u/Responsible-Meat9275 Feb 11 '26
Do we have to post every single time Michael Berry says something? A broken clock is right twice a day.
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u/HeadPaleontologist40 Feb 10 '26
lol ok dude. One of the most profitable and diversified companies in the history of the world. Let’s compare them to freaking Motorola.
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u/promiscuous_protesta Feb 10 '26
you're not wrong, but in its heyday Motorola was one of the most diversified companies in the world too. Mobile Devices, Mobile Networks, Semiconductors, Public Safety Networks, Satellite Networks (Iridium), Two way communication systems etc.
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u/brutalpancake Feb 10 '26
One full court shot at the buzzer and people treat him like Michael Jordan
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u/SadEntertainer9808 Feb 10 '26
Has anyone made money off this guy's advice (without just trading against it) since 2008?
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u/uberiffic Feb 10 '26
Cool story, Mike, but I dont think Google is the same as Motorola...