Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management has fully exited its position in Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) while doubling down on Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) as a core holding.
The firm completed its Alphabet exit in the second quarter, with Amazon now representing approximately 10% of Pershing Square’s reported holdings on its SEC Form 13F.
Ackman explained his reasoning in a post on X dated May 16, 2026, stating he sold the Alphabet position to free up cash for a new stake in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).
Pershing Square had begun selling Alphabet in the fourth quarter of 2025 while simultaneously building its Microsoft position and maintaining its large Amazon stake.
Amazon now sits as Pershing Square’s fourth-largest holding, even after the firm trimmed roughly a quarter of its position during the second quarter of 2026.
The firm’s mid-year investor update reiterated its expectation that Amazon will grow earnings at more than 20% annually, driven by artificial intelligence opportunities and continued e-commerce expansion.
Ackman originally purchased Amazon stock in April 2025, and his investment thesis has played out almost exactly as he predicted at the time of that initial buy.
When Ackman first bought Amazon, AWS was reporting 17% year-over-year revenue growth, and he expected rising AI demand to reaccelerate that figure significantly.
That prediction proved accurate, with AWS growth accelerating to 37% in the most recent quarter, its fastest pace in more than four years.
Amazon’s total revenue rose 20% year over year in the second quarter, while operating income jumped 43% to $27 billion, supporting Ackman’s view that the retail business has meaningful margin expansion potential.
Amazon has been investing in robotics and tightening inventory management to lift retail profitability, with those improvements showing up clearly in operating income growth figures.
One headwind Pershing Square acknowledged is Amazon’s aggressive capital spending on data center infrastructure, which pushed free cash flow to negative $8.8 billion in the second quarter.
Despite that drag, Ackman’s mid-year update expressed belief that the market is underestimating Amazon’s resilience and “significant growth runway” going forward.
Ackman expects new data center capacity to be absorbed by AI inference workloads and to earn attractive returns over time as demand for cloud computing continues to scale.
Pershing Square also used proceeds from trimming its Amazon position to establish new stakes in Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global, and Netflix, diversifying the portfolio further.
The firm still sees Amazon compounding earnings at over 20% annually, consistent with the broader Wall Street consensus on the company’s long-term trajectory.
Amazon stock currently trades around 22 times forward earnings, a valuation Pershing Square views as reasonable given the pace of expected earnings growth.
If Amazon delivers on those projections, Ackman’s position could generate market-beating gains even from current price levels, according to the firm’s stated outlook.
