Billionaire Bill Ackman Has 13% of Pershing Square Capital Management's $19 Billion Hedge Fund in 1 Stock That's 31% Below Its 52-Week High

Pershing Square’s Uber position, initiated in January 2025, is now its largest holding at 12.7% of its $19 billion portfolio despite Uber shares trading 31% below their 52-week high. The bullish thesis rests on Uber’s 16.2x forward P/E and estimated 25% annual EPS growth over the next three to five years; assuming that growth through 2030 and a 20x multiple, the article estimates 277% upside. Autonomous-vehicle disruption remains the principal risk, but AV rides represent only 0.1% of global ride-hailing trips versus Uber’s 297 million average weekly trips last quarter.

Analysis

The relevant debate is not whether autonomy displaces human drivers, but which layer captures the resulting cost savings. UBER’s demand aggregation, pricing, payments, and cross-sell surface can preserve take rate if AV operators remain capacity suppliers; however, fleet owners with proprietary consumer interfaces could compress marketplace economics materially. Near-term AV expansion is more likely to be a sentiment and multiple issue than an earnings issue, creating a disconnect between operating results and the stock’s autonomy narrative over the next 1-3 quarters.

Pershing Square’s concentration makes UBER a positioning-sensitive name: continued weakness can prompt copycat selling, while any evidence that autonomous partnerships are incremental rather than disintermediating could drive a sharp rerating. The key verification points are Mobility take rate, contribution-profit growth versus incentive spending, and whether AV trips cannibalize or expand gross bookings. A sustained deterioration in these metrics would invalidate the platform-defense thesis irrespective of headline trip growth.

The consensus may be assigning too much probability to a winner-take-all robotaxi market. Urban AV deployment likely fragments across jurisdictions, vehicle OEMs, fleet financiers, mapping stacks, and dispatch networks; fragmentation increases the value of a neutral demand broker. Conversely, Tesla’s vertically integrated consumer funnel is the clearest asymmetric threat if it demonstrates scalable, low-cost operations without relying on third-party marketplace demand.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Accumulate UBER in tranches over the next 1-3 months rather than chase a single catalyst; target a 12-18 month holding period. Thesis requires Mobility contribution profit and consolidated adjusted EBITDA to continue growing faster than incentives; exit or reduce if take rate falls for two consecutive reported quarters without offsetting volume acceleration.
• Use a relative-value expression: long UBER / short TSLA in equal beta-adjusted dollars for 6-12 months. This isolates the possibility that AV economics favor the demand marketplace over a capital-intensive proprietary fleet; reassess if Tesla establishes commercially scaled driverless service in multiple diverse geographies with disclosed positive unit economics.
• Do not underwrite the 25% EPS-growth case until separating operating earnings from investment gains, tax items, and share-count effects. Set an alert for the next earnings release: a guide-down in adjusted EBITDA, rising incentives as a percentage of gross bookings, or reduced buyback capacity would be a thesis-negative catalyst.
• Watch GOOG as the read-through on AV supplier bargaining power. Evidence that Waymo expands through third-party distribution while retaining limited consumer marketing spend would support UBER’s aggregator role; a broad direct-to-consumer rollout with materially lower fares would warrant reducing UBER exposure.