Bill Ackman shifts strategy: exiting Google and adding new bets to his portfolio

Bill Ackman, manager of the Pershing Square hedge fund and one of the most prominent activist investors on Wall Street, made the biggest turnaround in his investment portfolio in years during the second quarter of 2026. The fund added six new holdings — led by Netflix, Visa, and Mastercard — completely liquidated its position in Alphabet (Google), and increased its holding in Microsoft.

The report was published in the fund's filing on August 13 and received special attention because Ackman usually manages a highly concentrated portfolio of fewer than a dozen companies.

The move that closes the circle is the full exit from Alphabet. Ackman entered Google stock at the end of 2022, after it plummeted following the launch of ChatGPT and the fear that artificial intelligence would disrupt the search engine. The bet paid off — the stock recovered significantly, and Ackman has now exited it after a handsome profit.

At the same time, he increased his holding in Microsoft by about 10%, in Meta by about 20%, and in Uber by about 15%, and cut Amazon by more than a quarter. In other words, he is rotating his exposure to Big Tech, shifting weight from companies that have already risen to those that are still stuck in negative sentiment.

The new holding that is grabbing headlines is Netflix — and this is not Ackman's first time in the stock. In early 2022, he invested more than a billion dollars in it and sold the entire position about three months later at a loss of more than 400 million dollars, after the company reported its first decline in subscribers and he determined that the business model had become too unpredictable.

The irony: the very changes that drove him away then — led by the cheap advertising tier — are exactly what is driving Netflix today.

This time, the position amounts to 3.15 million shares, about 4.9% of the portfolio, and is worth more than two billion dollars. Ackman entered after the stock had fallen by about 50% from its June 2025 peak, and the forward P/E ratio had dropped from about 40 to about 23. In the report to investors, Ackman and investment manager Ryan Israel wrote that Netflix "has effectively won the streaming wars," with a subscriber base that exceeds every competitor by a wide margin.

The advantage, they claim, is self-reinforcing: the company can invest in content more than anyone else and spread the cost over a much larger audience. A figure that illustrates this: cash content spending has grown by only about 2% per year since 2021, while revenues have climbed at a double-digit rate.

The same logic recurs in all the new acquisitions. Visa and Mastercard were hit by the fear that AI agents and stablecoins would in the future bypass traditional payment networks, and S&P Global fell on the fear that AI tools would cheaply replicate the data and analytics it sells to financial clients. The common denominator for all of them, according to Ackman, is "simple, predictable, and cash-generating businesses" with a deep competitive advantage — which were sold cheaply due to a disruption that the market, in his opinion, was too quick to price in.

It is important to understand before being tempted to imitate Ackman: his performance has significantly lagged the market this year. The Pershing Square USA fund, which raised about five billion dollars in an IPO in April, was up only about 0.6% in net asset value through August 11 — while the S&P 500 climbed about 9% in the same period.

The stock price on the exchange is even weaker: about 20% below the IPO price of 50 dollars. His European fund, Pershing Square Holdings, also fell this year by about 4.3% in net asset value.

The conclusion for the private investor: Ackman's investment thesis may turn out to be correct — but even a brilliant investor with billions, a deep research team, and infinite patience for volatility does not guarantee a return in the short term. What is suitable for a hedge fund is not necessarily suitable for your pension portfolio. Those who are still interested in direct exposure can do so through the fund's stock traded in the USA under the ticker PSUS — but it is worth remembering that it is currently trading at a discount of about 20% to its net asset value, and at a significant loss since the IPO.