Before Michael Burry became famous for betting against the housing market in 2008, he was a teenager programming stock market games in BASIC and selling paper stock certificates to his friends. The investor shared a fascinating look at his early years this week, along with insights about what actually matters in investing—spoiler alert: it's not tech expertise.

Building a Stock Market Game on an IBM PC

On Thursday, Burry took to X to reminisce about 1982-83, when he and a friend created a stock market game using a semi-random number generator on his friend's family's new IBM (IBM) PC. That friend would eventually land at Microsoft Corp (MSFT).

"We printed up and sold stock certificates to friends. He and I co-founded the Computer Science club at Santa Teresa High in 1987," Burry wrote.

His tech journey didn't stop there. Burry learned Pascal, APL, and HTML. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, he worked at IBM research facilities in Silicon Valley, where he described debugging as "horrific" in the terminal-based, pre-WYSIWYG environment.

For those wondering, WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get"—a type of editor where content looks the same while editing as it will when published. It lets people add text, images, and format layouts visually, without needing to write code, making it easy for non-coders to create documents or web pages.

Burry revealed that his first coding assistant was an HTML editor called HoT MetaL, which he used around 1995. During the 1998-2000 dot-com boom, he worked near Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley. "Though I was in medicine."

Silicon Valley Proximity Doesn't Make You a Better Investor

Growing up and raising his children in Silicon Valley meant Burry was surrounded by semiconductor executives and successful startup founders. You'd think that kind of access would be invaluable for an investor.

But Burry eventually pursued other paths, hasn't coded in three decades, and never studied accounting.

"None of this really means anything. Being a good investor in an industry does not require having worked in the industry. It just requires work (and lots of reading)," he wrote.

It's a refreshingly straightforward take that cuts against the Silicon Valley mythology that you need to be deeply embedded in an industry to understand it. For Burry, the work—and especially the reading—is what separates great investors from everyone else.

The Warren Buffett Book That Changed Everything

When asked about his favorite must-read book, Burry cited "Buffett: Making of an American Capitalist" by Roger Lowenstein.

Asked whether he considers Warren Buffett the greatest investor of our time, Burry reflected on Lowenstein's 1995 biography, saying Buffett "was a force of nature."

Reading the book helped him understand the level of skill required to achieve greatness like Buffett—though he admitted it was a standard he could never fully reach, only aspire to. There's something both humble and revealing in that admission. Even Burry, who made one of the most legendary contrarian bets in financial history, sees Buffett as operating on another level entirely.

From Medical Doctor to Big Short Legend

Burry currently has a net worth of $200 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He's widely recognized for predicting and profiting from the 2008 housing market collapse.

His story was chronicled in Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short" and later adapted into the Oscar-winning film of the same name, where Burry was portrayed by Christian Bale.

Originally trained as a medical doctor, Burry founded Scion Capital, a hedge fund, in 2000. His strategy focused on identifying undervalued stocks and shorting overhyped assets, producing strong returns in the early 2000s, even amid the dot-com crash.

Taking On Nvidia

These days, Burry has been making significant ripples following his accusations that Nvidia Corp (NVDA) might be using accounting tricks to inflate its market value.

It's classic Burry—going after what he sees as an overvalued, overhyped asset that everyone else loves. Whether he's right about Nvidia remains to be seen, but his track record of contrarian bets certainly makes it worth paying attention when he starts questioning a company's accounting.

The core message from Burry's reflections is simple but powerful: successful investing isn't about credentials, geographic proximity to innovation, or industry experience. It's about doing the work, reading relentlessly, and thinking independently. That's how a medical doctor who programmed stock market games as a teenager ended up making one of the most profitable bets in financial history.