Who Is Philippe Laffont?

By Frank Bass – Sep 18, 2025 at 9:50PM | Fact-checked by Robin Hartill, CFP

Key Points

Philippe Laffont is the founder of Coatue Management, an investment firm that manages over $35 billion.
Laffont's firm specializes in tech investments and has earned significant returns.
Laffont has a degree in computer science from MIT and has called himself a "repressed mediocre computer scientist."
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Billionaire hedge fund and venture capital firm manager Philippe Laffont has won attention for his early investments in successful tech companies and his ability to thrive through market cycles. Read here to learn about Laffont's investment strategy, career highlights, and philosophy.

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Image source: Getty Images.

Primary role

Philippe Laffont is the founder and chief investment officer of Coatue Management, a hedge fund and venture capital firm launched in 1999.

Investment style

Laffont is best known as a growth investor who focuses on companies reporting major surges in revenue and earnings. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that most of his successes have been in the tech industry.

Laffont benefited from early investments in companies like Meta Platforms (META 0.82%). Yet, even though Meta and Amazon (AMZN -0.61%) are his hedge fund's second- and third-largest holdings, at 7.6% and 6.2%, respectively, he's expressed doubt about the long-term growth of the FAANG stocks: Facebook (now Meta), Apple (AAPL 2.04%), Amazon, Netflix (NFLX 1.4%), and Google, whose parent company is Alphabet (GOOG 0.86%)(GOOGL 0.82%).

Instead, Coatue plans to focus on opportunities presented by the growth of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI), and climate-related technologies.

An analysis of Laffont's biggest investments indicates he's most interested in fast-growing disruptive tech and the infrastructure that supports it. This goes a long way toward explaining his holdings in companies such as Nvidia (NVDA 0.86%), Broadcom (AVGO -1.24%), and CoreWeave (CRWV -3.44%).

There's plenty of great ideas, but the winners in the next 10 years are not going to be the FAANG stocks.
Phillippe Laffont

During a 2025 Coatue presentation, Laffont outlined his theory of tech innovation over time, summarizing it as:

The dominance of IBM (IBM 1.82%) in mainframe computing from 1960 to 1980
The rise of PCs, driven by Dell (DELL -1.14%), Intel (INTC 0.47%), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ 0.68%) in the 1980s
Networking advances from Ericsson (ERIC 0.58%), Nokia (NOK 1.06%), and Cisco (NYSE:CSCO) in the 1990s
Desktop internet innovation from Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta in the 2000s
The rise of the mobile internet through innovators such as ByteDance and Tencent (TCEHY 0.67%) in the 2010s
Cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) advances by Microsoft (MSFT 0.5%), Salesforce (CRM -1.11%), and Amazon in the early 2020s
The future, with AI benefiting Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM -1.49%), Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic, Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle (ORCL -6.93%), and OpenAI.

Although the future of AI is promising, Laffont has warned that its potential may be curbed by macroeconomic factors, such as high prices, tariffs, and growing budget deficits. However, he also said it's possible that the AI boom could create a "virtuous flywheel," replicating gains of the early PC/internet surge in the 1990s by increasing productivity and, in turn, reducing interest rates and budget deficits.

Career highlights

Laffont began his career as a "Tiger Cub" analyst for famed investor Julian Robertson's Tiger Management hedge fund. He left in 1999 to launch Coatue Management, named for a Nantucket, Massachusetts, vacation spot. The hedge fund started with $45 million in assets under management (AUM) and, by the end of the second quarter of 2025, had grown to hold $35.9 billion in assets.

Laffont has earned acclaim as an early-stage investor in successful tech companies. He's invested in pre-initial public offering (IPO) winners such as:

Tik Tok's parent company, ByteDance
Snapchat owner, Snap (SNAP -1.42%)
Grocery delivery service Instacart (CART -1.28%)
Ride-sharing business Lyft (LYFT -1.71%)
Streaming service Spotify (SPOT 1.06%)

He has also increasingly touted the potential of AI, putting money into tech giants such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, and CoreWeave. AI infrastructure start-up CoreWeave launched its IPO in March 2025 and more than tripled its initial $40 price before falling back to a mere 123% gain in six months. CoreWeave represented his fund's largest holding at the end of Q2 2025, making up 8.1% of Coatue's portfolio.

And while it's currently a minuscule portion of his holdings, Laffont described Bitcoin (BTC -0.21%) as a potentially intriguing investment opportunity at a May cryptocurrency summit, adding that if the crypto's beta continues to shrink, "that would be very interesting."

Philosophy & legacy

Launched in 1999, Coatue has survived both the dot-com bust of the early 2000s and the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Even though his personal wealth is estimated to have more than tripled since 2019 to $6.5 billion, Laffont told the Financial Times in 2022 that he still wakes up at 3 a.m. every night and checks a Bloomberg terminal to see "what could go wrong."

Laffont's focus on tech isn't a recent development. He left France to earn a degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Describing himself as a "repressed mediocre computer scientist," Laffont's success with tech stocks highlights the vital role of infrastructure that's powering technological secular trends.