Few names carry as much weight in the tech realm as Peter Thiel. He has a legendary track record, including being a part of the founding groups of both Palantir and PayPal. He was also the first outside investor in Facebook, now Meta Platforms, making it clear that he has an eye for spotting promising opportunities. When Thiel makes a move, investors should pay attention.
Because his portfolio is worth more than $100 million, his hedge fund, Thiel Macro, must report its end-of-quarter holdings to the Securities and Exchange Commission within 45 days of the end of that quarter via a Form 13F. Those forms are made available to the public. So the most recent information we have on his stock moves is as of Sept. 30, but those moves are noteworthy enough to consider even three months later.
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Thiel sold Tesla and Nvidia during Q3
At the end of Q2, Thiel held more than 272,000 shares of Tesla and more than 537,000 shares of Nvidia. At the end of Q3, he owned 65,000 Tesla shares and zero Nvidia shares. Those were huge divestitures, and the Nvidia sale in particular flew in the face of the trends in the artificial intelligence (AI) realm. However, Thiel didn't take these funds and invest them in completely different sectors, like industrial or healthcare. Instead, he put the proceeds of those sales into two other tech megacaps: Apple (AAPL +2.61%) and Microsoft (MSFT -1.24%).
Apple's AI strategy has been a flop, and it will need to make some major changes to get back in the race. As a result, I don't think Thiel was buying Apple for AI-related reasons (unless he knows something that we don't). I'm more interested in his Microsoft purchase.
Microsoft isn't a new holding for Thiel. He has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the stock. As of the end of Q4 2024, he owned no Microsoft shares. By the end of Q1, he owned nearly 80,000 shares. He sold all of them in Q2, then bought nearly 50,000 shares in Q3. Since Sept. 30, Microsoft's stock has declined by around 6%. So unless he has lost his faith in Microsoft, the buying opportunity now could be better than when this information was fresh.
The stock is also down by around 2% from June 30. This suggests that right now presents a better buying opportunity than the one that Thiel took advantage of. So should investors follow his lead and buy Microsoft?
Microsoft is acting neutral in the AI buildout
Unlike some of its peers, Microsoft chose not to build a generative AI model in-house. Instead, it opted to forge a partnership with OpenAI, and bought a meaningful stake in it. Today, Microsoft owns about 27% of the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC.
Microsoft has integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT into its Copilot product, which acts as an AI assistant for its Office products, Bing search engine, and Windows OS, among other software titles. However, OpenAI's not the only generative AI model maker that Microsoft has a partnership with.
NASDAQ: MSFT
Key Data Points
In its cloud computing segment, Microsoft Azure offers its customers access to multiple models to build applications on. Users can choose from Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, R1 from DeepSeek (a cheaper large language model from China), Meta's Llama, and others. This places Microsoft in a neutral position as a facilitator of the AI software trend. That status helped Azure achieve a jaw-dropping growth rate of 40% in Microsoft's fiscal 2026 first quarter, which ended Sept. 30.
Azure has become the crown jewel of Microsoft's business, and if it continues to have monster success throughout 2026, Thiel's investment will pay off. Based on its results so far, Microsoft appears well positioned to remain a winner in the AI boom.
