At the start of 1999, Stan Druckenmiller, Quantum’s supremo, had shared Robertson’s conviction that tech stocks were too high; but he had acted differently. Undeterred by the market’s momentum, Druckenmiller had placed an unhedged, outright bet against the tech bubble, picking a dozen particularly overvalued start-ups and shorting $200 million worth of them. Immediately, all of them shot up with a violence that made it impossible to escape: “They’d close one day at a hundred and open at one forty,” Druckenmiller remembered with a shudder.17 Within a few weeks the position had cost Quantum $600
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