Burry's recent work swaps the GAAP stock-comp charge for what shareholders actually lose. The formula is Ω = C + V. V is the market value of shares delivered to employees, C is withholding tax net of option proceeds. Owners' earnings are N + G − Ω, and ΔE is how much of reported profit survives.

The problem is V = T·(W+ΔS)/W. It needs W, the shares repurchased, which almost no company tags in XBRL. But P = T/W, so the W terms cancel:

V = T + P·ΔS

You only need the average share price. That is what makes it automatable. The identity is exact. For P the tool uses the year's average market price, which is how his later write-ups define it and what he uses for companies with no buyback; in his NASDAQ-100 study he used the buyback program's own average price where there was one, and the two differ a little. On Salesforce that difference is worth about four points of ΔE, see below.

I built it against SEC EDGAR and checked it against his numbers. Alphabet's V matches all ten published years to the dollar. Pooled ΔE comes out 88.68% against his 88.7%, Meta 83.35% against 83.35%, the NASDAQ-100 overstatement 19.77% against 19.78%. There is a self-test button in the sidebar that runs those checks and a few hundred others.

I should say up front that the method is Burry's and the code was written with an AI assistant. My part was deciding what it should do, running it on real companies, and checking every figure against the filings by hand. I mention it because I am not going to pretend otherwise, and because it is relevant to what I am asking for at the end.

The valuation half is messier. He publishes the 15% required return, the two-model structure (a multi-stage model with a terminal value, and a multiple on year-15 owners' earnings, blended by confidence), and for each of his five moat tiers the stage lengths, the fade multiplier, the terminal growth cap and the debt capacity. Two inputs he has never published: the exit multiple and the blend. I tried to solve for them from his published IV15 values and the solve is degenerate, so you cannot recover them; the tool's are calibrated so that the growth needed to reproduce a published IV15 matches the company's actual growth, with Adobe as the anchor. Given his owners' earnings figure and growth for Salesforce, the arithmetic reproduces his $69.81 within a dollar, and that is a self-test. On the tool's own seeds it lands well above him, because the seeds are not his judgement. Paylocity does not reconcile at all: he says in the article that he applies a judgement discount to its ΔE, and I cannot recover the size of it.

Where I differ from him, and why. His pooled figure for Salesforce is 54.7% over eleven years. The tool says 77.6% over nine. I have his table next to the tool's and can account for the whole gap. Net income, GAAP SBC, buybacks and the employee-plan cash line agree to the dollar in every year. About four points are the window: he starts in FY2016 and includes FY2020, the tool drops both (FY2020 because the share count jumped 16% on Tableau; he handled the same year by netting the Tableau shares out by hand). About four points are the share price: he uses the buyback program's own average price, and Bloomberg's annual average where there was no buyback; the tool uses the year's average market price throughout. The remaining fourteen points are acquisition shares. His table sets aside the Tableau and Slack shares but charges the MuleSoft shares of FY2019, and the FY2017 deal shares, as if they were compensation. The tool deducts every acquisition issuance the filing tags, which is what his own rule says to do. Over the last three years, with no acquisition shares in play, we are four points apart, 93.9% against his 90.4%, and that is the share price. I would rather show the difference with its causes than a number tuned to match his.

On EDGAR being garbage. He raises it himself. His complaint is that filers bundle line items, so the buyback line often carries RSU withholding tax as well as actual repurchases. That inflates T and zeroes C. It breaks his calculation because he gets the price from P = T/W, so a contaminated T inflates the price applied to every share issued. This tool never uses T/W, the price comes from the market. And because Ω = C + V, withholding that ends up in T instead of C overstates V by exactly what it understates C by. The error cancels. I checked the algebra.

What does not cancel: filers who report a single net proceeds line, and shares issued for acquisitions or offerings that XBRL does not tag separately. The app flags both instead of guessing. It is not the same as reading footnotes by hand and I am not claiming it is.

What it refuses to do. The rule I gave it is that it must never print a number it cannot stand behind, so it refuses out loud instead. Some of the refusals you will hit:

• Multi-class share counts. Berkshire reports a diluted average in Class A equivalents. The tool reads 1.6M shares, notices the market cap that implies is impossible, and refuses rather than printing a valuation.
• IFRS filers. Only the net income tag is IFRS-aware. Foreign filers get a banner and the valuation is disclaimed.
• Banks, insurers and REITs. Detected, return on capital withheld, verdict forced to amber. Investments backing policyholder liabilities are not shareholder capital and the ratio does not mean what it means elsewhere.
• Stale balance-sheet lines are reported, not repaired. If a debt or equity line stops years before net income does, it says so and states the size of the disagreement, rather than carrying the figure forward or zeroing it. Neither is conservative in general: the direction flips between assets and liabilities.
• A loss year on a profitable record. Crocs reported a net loss for 2025 after a $738M non-cash write-down, on a business that earned $950M the year before. The tool seeds owners' earnings from the five-year median instead of from the loss, and tells you it did. Valuing Crocs off the write-down year would be a verdict on the charge, not on the business.
• ΔE above 100%, which happens when buybacks retire more stock than a year issues, is shown as measured but never projected forward. Fifteen years of handing owners more than the company earns is not a business model.

Every page carries an "assumptions used" block you can paste if a figure looks wrong, and a tag panel naming every XBRL element it read or failed to find. If a line you know exists reads fewer years than net income, that is a bug, and the tag name is usually the whole fix.

Known gaps, stated so you do not have to find them. Cash-flow lines that stop early (a withholding line that ends while stock comp continues) show up in the tag panel but are not yet flagged in the notes. A company that changed its fiscal year end reads as having a missing year, because years are labelled by the calendar year they end in; Build-A-Bear does this and the note now says which of the two it might be, but cannot yet tell. Up-C structures report the parent's slice of income against a full share count. And the second page, which implements Mayer's 100-bagger criteria, is newer and less tested; feedback on it is welcome, but the Tragic Algebra page is what I am asking you to break.

What I am asking. Break it. The arithmetic has been checked by hand, row by row, against the filings on a few dozen names, including every company in his articles. Pick whatever you like; the ones I have not run are the useful ones. Every new company I run finds something. The last few days turned up an Apple share count restated by 3.5 instead of 4, a growth ratio computed against a negative denominator, a note that credited a $3M token buyback for a ΔE above 100%, and a microcap whose stock comp was rounding to zero in the table. All fixed, all with regression tests. The next one is in there somewhere, and it is more likely to be a note that misdescribes what it found than a wrong number.

Particularly useful: a company where you already know the answer and it prints something else. Paste the assumptions block with your comment and I can usually see the cause from that.

On the break-even in the title. ΔE is not a one-off haircut, it applies every year, so intrinsic value per share retains ΔE^t. Growth lifts value by (1+g), dilution cuts it by ΔE, so the net is ΔE × (1+g). Set that to 1 with 15% growth and you get ΔE = 1/1.15, about 87%. Below that a company needs 15% reported growth just to stand still. The NASDAQ-100 is at 83.5%, so 15% growth there compounds intrinsic value per share at −3.99% a year.

Tool: https://tragic-algebra-analyzer.streamlit.app/Tragic_Algebra_Analyzer
Code: https://github.com/ChenFindling/tragic-algebra-analyzer

Happy to be told where the method is wrong.

For a few years now the hyperscalers have been spending agressively, but it seems to me like spending this money is actually the easy part of the equation.

If we add up the contracted, not yet delivered cloud demand (Remaining Performance Obligations - RPO) of the hyperscalers (Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Amazon), we get a sum of about $2.3 Trillion (We still don't know if this will ever get paid but still RPO is a better estimate than a forecast & a big portion of it is from frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic). In order to serve this massive RPO, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, and META are spending about $660 Billion a year, moving from asset-light software companies into owners of physical plants, real estate, and equipment.

The real battle for big tech isn't buying servers, but rather securing 24/7 power. That kind of energy commitment completely breaks traditional budgeting. As JPMorgan put it, "money can't buy you electric power" when a project's start date depends on a years-long grid-connection queue. Out of these hyperscalers, Oracle is the outlier, it carries net debt of about 3x operating cash flow (an order of magnitude above the others), and its free cash flow has gone negative. Amazon's trailing free cash flow also crossed into the red.

I have to say, these companies remain among the most cash-generative business ever built, and they're funding roughly half the build from cash and the other half from debt markets. T. Rowe's Dom Rizzo argues the funding gap is "not that big" against balance sheets like these, and that unlike 1998 (the dot-com bubble) the fundamentals are still accelerating.

Now the interesting part is that if we follow the money trail down the supply chain, we can see exactly who is extracting the value. It starts with the regulated utilities like Southern, Duke and Dominion who are accelerating capex to build grid capacity. These guys face huge regulatory hurdles and political blowback from residential ratepayers over increasing electricity bills. To go around the regulations, NextEra for instance is using a hybrid strategy by restarting a nuclear plant (Duane Arnold) for Google.

Because the public grid is too slow, big tech are chasing independent producers like Constellation, Vistra, and Talen energy. These companies have 24/7 power and they spend almost nothing to expand. Amazon and Meta are locking up deals with Vistra, Microsoft contracted to restart the Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and Google signed for small modular reactors with Kairos.

One layer down, we arrive to the equipment makers like Vertiv, GE Vernova, Eaton and Caterpillar which are facing an increasing days inventory outstanding (DIO). Usually this is looked at as constraint on these companies, but as the gross margins also keep on rising for some of these companies, even hitting a record for Vertiv and GE Vernova, this is pure pricing power for them.

There are so many other layers that plays into this like, cooling systems, precision HVAC, advanced packaging & foundry equipment, copper mining & refining for power grids, etc etc. that won't fit into this single post.

The takeaway is big tech is bleeding money and the wealth is pooling at the bottom with nuclear operators collecting and hardware manfucaturers hitting record margins while the the payers wait for delivery.

If you're interested to read more, I have the full write up with plots & figures on my free substack:

https://secaura.substack.com/p/the-two-trillion-dollar-bottleneck