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American billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has about $4.4 billion riding on Microsoft and Amazon, and the two stocks now make up more than a fifth of everything Pershing Square Capital Management holds in the U.S. stock market.
The firm's latest 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, covering the quarter to June 30, shows Microsoft at about $2.32 billion, or 11.9% of the portfolio, and Amazon at about $2.04 billion, or 10.5%. Together they account for 22.4% of a portfolio that grew to $19.47 billion during the quarter.
The two positions are moving in opposite directions, however. Pershing Square added almost 10% to its Microsoft stake in the quarter and cut Amazon by about a quarter.
Why Ackman went against the crowd on Microsoft
Ackman started buying Microsoft in February, after the stock dropped about 10% in a day on a slightly weaker than expected cloud growth number. He said as much in a lengthy post on X in May, describing the software giant as a "core holding" and arguing investors had misread its $190 billion capital spending plan as a threat to margins rather than an investment in growth.
He also pointed to something the market was not pricing in: Microsoft's 27% economic stake in OpenAI, worth roughly $200 billion at the startup's most recent funding valuation.
The bet has started to pay off. In its fiscal fourth quarter, Microsoft grew revenue 18% to $90 billion, and its cloud business rose 27% to $59.3 billion. Its backlog of contracted cloud work reached $678 billion, up 84% from a year earlier.
Ackman sold the firm's remaining Alphabet shares in the quarter to fund the move.
Amazon trimmed, not abandoned
The Amazon cut looks like reshuffling rather than a change of heart. In its mid-year letter to investors, Pershing Square repeated its view that Amazon can grow earnings more than 20% a year, driven by cloud demand and rising retail margins. The firm also opened four new positions in the quarter, in Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global and Netflix, which needed funding.
Amazon's own numbers back the thesis. Second-quarter sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion, and Amazon Web Services grew 37%, its fastest pace in 18 quarters. The company has raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to $220 billion, largely because memory chip prices have soared, but says its data center capacity is sold out through the end of the year.
Ackman has avoided three of the so-called Magnificent Seven entirely: Nvidia, Tesla and Apple. His picks within the group have been companies with an identifiable catalyst rather than broad exposure to big tech. Microsoft and Amazon, in his telling, still qualify.
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