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In late 1986, Paul Tudor Jones made a prediction.
"There will be some type of a decline, without a question, in the next 10, 20 months," he said. "And it will be earthshaking; it will be saber-rattling."
And less than a year later, on Oct. 19, 1987, the earth shook and the sabers rattled when the stock market crashed.
That day is now known as Black Monday, and while the rest of the world was busy losing an estimated $1.71 trillion, Tudor Jones, who founded Tudor Investment Corp. in 1980, tripled his money due to large short positions.
Peter Borish, the second most senior member of Tudor Investment, analyzed the 1929 pre-crash market compared to the 1987 market and found many similarities.
By betting on a crash in the U.S. stock market, Tudor returned 125.9% after fees, earning an estimated $100 million.
"It is not that we had any unfair knowledge that other people didn’t have; it is just that we did our homework," Tudor Jones said of his success. "People just don’t want to believe that anyone can break away from the crowd and rise above mediocrity."
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Tudor Jones: 'Failure...sometimes a good thing.'
Tudor Jones, 69, has been breaking away from the crowd for quite a while. Born in Memphis in 1954, Jones got into the business world by trading cotton futures at the New York Cotton Exchange.
That job ended abruptly one day when Tudor Jones was fired for falling asleep at his desk after a night of partying in New Orleans.
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"Failure will give you a tattoo that will stay with you your whole life, and sometimes it's a really good thing," he said later about the incident.
Tudor Jones later served as treasurer in 1986 and then as chairman of the New York Cotton Exchange from August 1992 through June 1995.
Tudor Jones became a commodities broker for E.F. Hutton in 1976. Four years later, he founded Tudor Investment.
In 1990, as the Japanese equities bubble burst, Tudor Jones returned 87.4% by shorting the market.
Tudor Jones is making another prediction now, and this time, it's about artificial intelligence, noting that AI could spark the next boom in productivity.
He told CNBC that only a few times in the past 75 years have technological advances been so crucial that they've unleashed 1% to 2% increases in productivity, and AI stands to be the next one of them.
And it's almost impossible to talk about AI without mentioning Nvidia (NVDA) , which holds the market's dominant position in artificial intelligence chip making.