George Soros’s fund has sold its stake in Facebook after he blasted tech giants – but has upped its Twitter and Snap holdings
Soros Fund Management, the firm run by billionaire hedgie manager George Soros, has finally sold its stake in Facebook after Soros blasted tech giants at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.
Yet it seems the 87-year-old investor is not quite ready to practice what he preaches just yet, as regulatory filings reveal he has upped his stake in Twitter to $819,000, taken a brand new $2.1m stake in Snapchat owner Snap, and increased his stake in Google parent Alphabet to $4.8m.
As Soros told a Davos dinner audience in January that tech firms such as these were “deliberately engineering addiction”, he was heckled by one person at the back of the room who asked why he was still investing in them. Soros either did not hear, or chose to ignore the comment.
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Soros appears to be generally bullish on consumer-facing tech companies, as he took a massive new $158m stake in US internet retailer Overstock – which has accepted bitcoin since 2014 – and a $13.7m stake in Netflix.
Other retailers were also prevalent on Soros’s investment list, as he grabbed a $36.4m stake in Target, a $34m chunk of Gap Inc. and upped his holding in Urban Oufitters to $35.9m.
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A tale of two faces
The purchase of Overstock, which is at its heart a homeware retailer, also raises questions about Soros’s true feelings towards cryptocurrencies. In Davos, he denounced bitcoin as “a speculation based on a misunderstanding”, claiming its price will be “propped up by dictators” who will use it to “build their nest eggs”.
Yet the chunky investment in Overstock, which has seen its share price rocket since it announced it would create an exchange to start trading cryptocurrencies, implies he doesn’t see the bubble bursting any time soon.
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