{"id":271220,"date":"2025-11-19T07:27:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T07:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/271220\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T07:27:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T07:27:15","slug":"why-some-elite-investors-are-selling-nvidia-shares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/271220\/","title":{"rendered":"Why some elite investors are selling Nvidia shares"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

New York
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Three prominent investors with almost nothing in common are dumping their shares of Nvidia, the computer chip juggernaut that went from relative obscurity to the world\u2019s first $5 trillion valuation in just three years.\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s hard to overstate Nvidia\u2019s superlatives. On its own it makes up 8% of the total value of the S&P 500. Its annual net income grew more than 580% between 2023 and 2024. It\u2019s become almost a joke on Wall Street that the company consistently blows past expectations, notching quarter after quarter of financial gains, thanks to seemingly bottomless demand for Nvidia\u2019s sophisticated chips, which are key to building artificial intelligence models like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT or Anthropic\u2019s Claude.\n <\/p>\n

\n So why sell now? Isn\u2019t betting against Nvidia now a bit like betting against the 1995 Bulls? (As in, you\u2019d be out of your mind to do so)?\n <\/p>\n

\n Maybe not. There are any number of reasons why investors would sell Nvidia, but the timing of these recent moves is fueling concerns that the company \u2014 and by extension, the entire AI industry \u2014 is part of a speculative bubble<\/a> that\u2019s bound to burst.\n <\/p>\n

\n On Monday, a regulatory filing showed tech billionaire Peter Thiel\u2019s hedge fund had, sometime in the three months ending in September, sold its entire stake in Nvidia \u2014 all 537,742 shares, which would be worth about $100 million as of September 30, the last day of the quarter. The disclosure, three days ahead of Nvidia\u2019s upcoming earnings release, rattled investors, who are already nervous about when, or whether, they\u2019ll see a return on their AI investments.\n <\/p>\n

\n Thiel\u2019s revelation came days after Japanese conglomerate SoftBank said it had sold all of its Nvidia holdings for $5.8 billion. And earlier this month, Michael Burry \u2014 the \u201cBig Short\u201d investor who anticipated the housing market\u2019s collapse in 2008 \u2014 disclosed that his hedge fund had bought $9.2 million in \u201cput\u201d options against Nvidia and Palantir, another AI darling, essentially wagering that their stocks will fall.\n <\/p>\n

\n What do Thiel, Burry and SoftBank know about Nvidia that the rest of us don\u2019t? What are they seeing that the rest of Wall Street can\u2019t (or doesn\u2019t want to) see?\n <\/p>\n

\"Peter<\/p>\n

\n To be sure, these folks all had their reasons, and not all of them are directly betting against Nvidia or AI.\n <\/p>\n

\n SoftBank and its CEO, Masayoshi Son, remain fully aboard the AI hype wagon. But they also needed to gin up a bunch of cash soon to complete a nearly $23 billion investment in OpenAI, prompting them to take their Nvidia profits.\n <\/p>\n

\n Burry\u2019s position is a much more skeptical one. In a post on X, Burry wrote that he believes Big Tech companies are \u201cunderstating depreciation\u201d<\/a> around Nvidia\u2019s core product \u2014 essentially, they\u2019ll soon be sitting on a bunch of equipment that\u2019s obsolete, and they\u2019re undervaluing how much that will hurt their bottom line.\n <\/p>\n

\n Representatives for Thiel, a co-founder of surveillance software giant Palantir and a guy who reportedly believes<\/a> that strictly regulating AI tech will hasten the arrival of the Antichrist, did not respond to a request for comment. Thiel has previously staked out a fairly conservative position on AI, telling<\/a> the New York Times\u2019 Ross Douthat that the technology is \u201cmore than a nothing burger\u201d but \u201cless than the total transformation of our society.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The timing of these moves \u2014 coming the same quarter that Nvidia hit $5 trillion in market value (it\u2019s now back down to a measly $4.5 trillion) \u2014 may be purely coincidental. But they\u2019re not helping soothe any nerves on Wall Street.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI don\u2019t read a lot into people\u2019s timing with respect to this stuff,\u201d Paul Kedrosky, a partner at SK Ventures, told CNN. \u201cBut I do think that there\u2019s been a kind of Gestalt shift in terms of how people think about this entire area and what are reasonable assumptions about future growth.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Nvidia sank 2% Monday<\/a>, even as analysts expected the company to once again deliver a solid earnings report on Wednesday. Other tech stocks and crypto followed, dragging the broader market down. Wall Street\u2019s fear gauge, the VIX, jumped 13%. CNN\u2019s Fear and Greed index<\/a> traded in \u201cextreme fear\u201d and hit its lowest level since early April.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think we\u2019re at a tipping point of this bubble,\u201d Mike O\u2019Rourke, chief market atrategist at JonesTrading, told CNN Monday. \u201cAnd then you have all these other things that were just massively speculative this year,\u201d he added, citing the crypto rally and the expansion of digital asset treasury companies<\/a>. \u201cNow you\u2019ve seen that very speculative aspect start to unwind, and I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if it bleeds over and people get a little more cautious.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount Michael Burry spent on puts. He spent $9.2 million.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-271220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}