Michael Burry has moved out of Alibaba and into JD.com, and said so in a Substack note posted early on the afternoon of 23 August US Eastern time. Fortune published its account at 1:58 PM ET the same day. The detail that matters is the sequence, and most headlines have it backwards.
What the common framing gets wrong
The story is being told as an investor dumping Alibaba in response to its HK$80bn share sale. That is not what he described. The rotation out of Alibaba and into JD.com had already happened. What the placement changed was his intention to return. In his words: "I planned to move most of it back after a month or two. No longer." The causality runs the other way from the way it is being reported — the share sale did not trigger the exit, it cancelled the re-entry.
The price he named
Burry said Alibaba's share price would need to fall by half for him to get interested again. That is a specific and demanding threshold, and it is the most quotable line in the note, but it is a statement of personal appetite rather than a forecast or a valuation argument. He did not publish a model.
What is not disclosed
There are no position sizes. Burry described the JD.com stake as "large" and the Alibaba position as exited, but no number attaches to either, and neither is confirmed by a regulatory filing — a Substack note carries no disclosure obligation and no auditing. He first disclosed building the Alibaba position in April 2026, so the round trip took roughly four months. Anyone sizing this as a market event is working from an adjective.
Why a single investor's note travelled
It travelled because of who wrote it and because it landed the same day Alibaba priced its placement. The coincidence of timing is real and is what made it news. But the note itself is a short piece of personal commentary from an investor with no obligation to be complete, published on a platform he controls — and its central claim, on his own telling, predates the event it is being attached to.