'Black Swan' investor Mark Spitznagel predicts AI boom ends with crash of a lifetime

Mark Spitznagel says the AI boom likely has further to run, but a monumental crash is coming.

The founder and chief of Universa Investments, a "Black Swan" fund that aims to win big from catastrophes, shared his stock-market outlook and reflected on his investing style in a recent interview with Business Insider.

Spitznagel said Universa's signature tail-hedging strategy has enabled him to be "extremely bullish" for the past four years, despite his hedge fund being "certainly the most bearish vehicle you'll ever find."

He flagged signs of excessive leverage and "hubristic, humongous bets," but said he didn't see anything likely to cause an imminent stock-market crash.

However, he warned the economy is "rolling over" as the aftershocks from interest-rate hikes in recent years haven't yet fully materialized.

Spitznagel said that Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame, is right to worry about AI hyperscalers' overinvestment in microchips and data centers, circular financing deals, and hidden liabilities. Yet Burry is "going to get the timing wrong," he said.

"I will be the biggest bear that you'll hear from in the months ahead," Spitznagel said. "I'm just not right now."

He predicted "one more really big, risk-on, insane, euphoric rally to come across risk assets."

"But once that's over, and it could be sooner than later, I think we're going to get a bigger crash than we've seen in our lifetime," he added.

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"It's like you're playing the piano for 10 years and you still can't play 'Chopsticks,' and the only thing you have to keep you going is the belief that one day you'll wake up and play like Rachmaninoff."

That's how Spitznagel described his investing approach to journalist Malcolm Gladwell for a 2002 article in The New Yorker. Spitznagel was then head trader at Empirica Capital, a hedge fund he launched with "The Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb in 1999.