As far back as April 2005, Burry theorized in emails to his staff that a run on AIG would appear as collateral calls following a ratings downgrade.

True: contemporaneous emails or other dated documents (e.g. as cited in Michael Lewis's The Big Short, FCIC materials, or Burry's released correspondence or letters) show that Burry wrote to his staff by April 2005 theorizing that a run on AIG would take the form of collateral calls triggered by a ratings downgrade. Mostly true: such emails exist and contain this theory, but they date from a little after April 2005 (within a few months), or they described the mechanism slightly differently. Mixed: documents show he flagged AIG's risk by then but without the collateral-call or downgrade mechanism. Mostly false: the theory appears only in clearly later documents (e.g. 2007 or after), or is evidenced only by his own later retelling with no corroboration and some contradiction. False: dated records show he held no such view in 2005, or his early communications contradict it.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 A Series of Scion Funds, LLC Annual Letter Scion Capital, ... investorkurs.no (hosts a PDF of Scion Capital investor letters) Own record

   “Won’t AIG have to start posting massive cash collateral for the first time if it were downgraded?”

2. E2 Betting on the Blind Side Vanity Fair · 1 March 2010

   “Yet, when Michael Burry pestered the firms in the beginning of 2005, only Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs had any real interest in continuing the conversation.”

3. E3 Michael Burry's Testimony Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission ValueWalk · 29 March 2011 Own record

   “MB: I’m sorry I receive most of my information from my back office.”

4. E4 (none) investorkurs.no (hosts a PDF of Scion Capital investor letters) Own record

   ““Won’t AIG have to start posting massive cash collateral for the first time if it were downgraded?””

5. E5 Betting on the Blind Side Vanity Fair · 1 March 2010

   “On May 19, 2005, Mike Burry did his first subprime-mortgage deals.”

6. E6 Michael Burry's Testimony Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission ValueWalk · 29 March 2011

   “So do you recall if you had any CDS with Goldman in the third quarter of ’08 when AIG goes down?”

7. E7 [PDF] The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Michael Lewis (excerpt hosted at pwn.ersh.io)

   “On March 19, 2005, alone in his office with the door closed and the shades drawn, reading an abstruse textbook on credit derivatives, Michael Burry got an idea: credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds.”

8. E8 [PDF] The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Michael Lewis (excerpt hosted at pwn.ersh.io)

   “The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG [....]”

9. E9 How the Bets Outgrew the Market: 2008 Crisis, Part 4 adventuresincre.com (independent author's blog series) · 27 August 2026

   “A single one-notch downgrade of AIG could trigger a collateral call of about $10.5 billion.”

The only material that matches the theory is a line in Burry's Scion investor letters (E2, E6): "Won't AIG have to start posting massive cash collateral for the first time if it were downgraded?" That quote has no date, comes from Burry himself, and does not show that it was written to staff in or by April 2005. The independent Big Short material dates his credit-default-swap idea to March 2005 (E9) and his first subprime trades to May 2005 (E7), and says AIG was the counterparty (E10), but none of it mentions emails to staff about collateral calls after a downgrade. With no dated record that corroborates the April 2005 emails, the claim cannot be settled.