'Big Short' Legend Steve Eisman Calls Nvidia's 73% Revenue Growth 'Incredible'

Steve Eisman called it “incredible” that Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) grew revenue 73% in a single year, but the stock closed down anyway.

On the Real Eisman Playbook podcast the investor, famous for predicting the 2008 crisism walked through the numbers: fiscal Q4 revenue of $68.1 billion, EPS up 82%, and guidance that beat by a wide margin.

“Revenue beat, EPS beat, guidance beat by a lot,” Eisman said.

A P/E That Says Everything

Eisman pointed to Nvidia’s forward price-to-earnings of roughly 25x despite projecting 67% EPS growth this fiscal year. The S&P 500 forward PE is 21.6x, per FactSet.

The largest company on the planet, growing earnings at triple the rate of the index, is trading at essentially the same multiple. That gap, Eisman said, “expresses all the doubts now surrounding AI.”

Four hyperscalers have already projected $650 billion in combined AI capex for 2026, up from $450 billion last year. “Nvidia’s numbers had to be great,” Eisman said. “And they were.”

What Prediction Markets Say

The skepticism shows up in prediction markets too.

Before earnings, Polymarket gave Nvidia a 93% chance of beating EPS but just a 25% chance of closing above $200 by month-end.

The stock finished February at $177. Everyone expected the blowout. Nobody expected it to matter.

Eisman flagged the $650 billion in projected hyperscaler capex as both Nvidia’s greatest tailwind and its biggest risk.

If that spending doesn’t generate returns for the companies writing the checks, the capex cycle reverses and the growth rate that justifies even a 25x multiple vanishes.

Polymarket’s AI Bubble Burst by…? contract prices an 15% chance of an industry downturn by year-end on nearly $2 million in volume.

Resolution requires three of six triggers within 90 days, including Nvidia falling 50% from its all-time high, SOXX dropping 40%, or OpenAI or Anthropic declaring bankruptcy.

The Real Risk Is Downstream

Eisman’s worry isn’t the chip maker. It’s what AI does to the software companies that private credit funded.

The same AI spending that powered Nvidia’s quarter is the thing that kills the software companies downstream.

If their products get replaced, the private credit loans that funded their buyouts go bad.

And those losses don’t stay on Wall Street, they flow into 401k plans and insurance policies.

He estimated over 20% of the $1.8 trillion private credit market is exposed to software buyout loans, many of which were made at high valuations before LLMs existed.

Firms like Blue Owl Capital (NYSE:OWL), which recently froze retail fund redemptions amid software lending concerns, illustrate the pressure building across the sector.

Software insiders aren’t buying their own stock. “What does that tell you?” Eisman said.

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