'The Big Short' star Michael Burry invested in a SPAC buying Harley-Davidson's electric-motorcycle unit. He might be trolling Elon Musk or nodding to Warren Buffett.

• Michael Burry built a $10 million stake in a SPAC buying Harley-Davidson's electric-motorcycle unit.
• "The Big Short" investor, who bet on a key SpaceX rival last year, may be trolling Elon Musk.

Michael Burry $4 a $10 million bet on an electric-motorcycle maker. The investor may be warming up to special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), $4 at $4 and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, or placing a bold wager on a business with historical links to Warren Buffett.

Burry is best known for his massive bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble, which was immortalized in the book and movie "The Big Short." The Scion Asset Management boss also $4 for the meme-stock movement by investing in games retailer GameStop in 2019, and $4 last year over Tesla's heady valuation.

Scion held 1 million shares of AEA-Bridges Impact, a SPAC created by AEA Investors and Bridges Fund Management, at the end of December. The blank-check company had $4 to acquire LiveWire, $4's electric-motorcycle division, a couple of weeks before that.

AEA-Bridges Impact plans to finance the merger with the $400 million it raised from its stock-market debut in October 2020, plus $100 million from both Harley-Davidson — set to own 74% of LiveWire after the transaction closes — and Kymco, a Taiwanese powersports company.

Burry has $4 that companies going public via SPAC deals aren't well-vetted and may not be the best businesses. However, Scion also bought a piece of Vector Acquisition, a SPAC that agreed to to buy SpaceX rival Rocket Lab, in the first quarter of 2021.

It's notable that Burry, a value investor famous for sniffing out cheap and staid businesses, has now made a couple bets on aggressively valued, unproven technology companies. In the same year that he $4 against Tesla, he backed businesses in Musk's core industries of space transportation and electric vehicles.

Burry, who $4 as a young investor, $4 a "Buffett stock" nearly two decades before the Berkshire Hathaway chief made the iPhone maker the $4 in his portfolio. His LiveWire investment could be a nod to Buffett, who $4 to Harley-Davidson during the financial crisis.

"I kind of like a business where your customers tattoo your name on their chest," the Berkshire boss quipped several years later.

LiveWire's SPAC deal values it at about $1.8 billion. The business only made 387 bikes in 2021, generating $33 million in revenue and a $66 million pre-tax loss. The company's executives are targeting 100,000 units, $1.8 billion in revenue, and $64 million in profits in 2026.

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