With Roaring Kitty largely absent from the picture, GameStop is getting a look from one of Wall Street’s most famous skeptics.

Shares climbed more than 8% at one point to start the week after investor Michael Burry disclosed that he’s been buying the stock. Rather than pitching a return of meme-stock chaos, Burry framed the move as a long-term value bet tied to the company’s balance sheet and leadership.

Burry, best known for betting against the U.S. housing market ahead of the financial crisis and who recently closed Scion Asset Management, laid out his thinking in a Substack post. He said he believes he’s been accumulating GameStop at what could soon be roughly 1x tangible book value.

“I own GME. I have been buying recently,” Burry wrote. “I expect I am buying at what may soon be 1x tangible book value / 1x net asset value.”

He also made a point to separate this view from the meme-stock playbook that once defined the name. Burry said he’s not counting on another short squeeze and isn’t trying to revisit the volatility of 2021, when retail traders pushed the stock sharply higher and forced hedge funds into rapid cover trades.

Instead, his attention is on what GameStop looks like today.

Under CEO Ryan Cohen, the company has been eliminating many of its physical stores. It’s also been cutting costs, and taking advantage of higher share prices to raise cash. What remains is a business with a weaker core retail operation, but a much larger cash position and more room to maneuver.

Burry spoke out about his recent decision to buy the original meme stock:

“Ryan is making lemonade out of lemons,” he wrote. “He has a crappy business, and he is milking it best he can while taking advantage of the meme stock phenomenon to raise cash and wait for an opportunity to make a big buy of a real growing cash cow business.”

That cash balance sits at the center of the argument. GameStop now holds billions in liquidity after raising money through equity offerings and other balance-sheet moves during periods of elevated interest. Burry views that capital, along with what he sees as disciplined decision-making, as the main source of value.

He also referenced GameStop’s move into bitcoin last year, a decision that drew comparisons to MicroStrategy. While Burry said he remains unsure about the crypto strategy, he acknowledged that the results to date have been difficult to dismiss.

“I do not know about this Bitcoin thing,” he wrote, “but I cannot argue with what has been done so far.”

GameStop was last trading around $25 and is now up more than 20% on the year… calm, by meme-stock standards. The foam has mostly settled, the day traders have wandered off, and Burry’s comments make it sound like people are finally talking about cash and financials instead of screenshots and emojis.

Which is… weird, coming from Michael Burry.

This is the same guy whose whole brand is betting against popular narratives, not buying a stock that could snap back into meme stock chaos at any moment. And that’s the irony here, Burry’s treating GameStop like a slow, patient value play… but if Roaring Kitty pops back onto the internet tomorrow, all of that discipline could get steamrolled in about five minutes.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in GameStop and Bitcoin as mentioned in the article.