You are not addressing the point: having enough capital to support a completely valid short position against an irrational market is staggeringly hard to do, to the point the most reliable short in history was still in danger of wiping out the person who was right about it and ended up making a huge amount of money from it.
You’re right of course and Michael Burry made a great trade recognizing the CDO issue and bad incentives around reselling mortgages leading to banks giving mortgages to people that couldn’t afford them and not taking the risk directly.
It was also time bounded (he knew when the rates would change and they’d start to fail).
That said, people often use the “market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” line as an excuse - basically to say they’re right about an “impending crash” on an infinite timeline. If you can’t predict it within a bounded timeframe than your prediction is useless and ultimately equivalent to predicting nothing.
In the case of the OP he was clearly wrong, and instead of updating is spinning it as he was kinda right anyway. I think that’s dumb.
Which might be relevant if it was 20 years later, but it's not. Tesla's stock run-up preceded a number of unprecedented events that are all notably not associated with it's actual fiscal success. So it's incredibly vapid to a year later saying "see! It's not going to crash!"
I mean sure...put your money where your mouth is on that one, but I'm not buying TSLA at $1096 per share.
The original comment was nothing about Burry. Burry is relevant because he did sucessfully make money off the GFC by spotting the issue. Barely: he was facing stockholder revolt over the fees involved in maintaining the position, even though it resolved.
Which is the point: the market can (generally) remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent. Even when you're right.
There was a crash in 1999, but the underlying economic shift created by the internet was real and major companies survived it.
I suspect something similar is likely here.