Billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s fund, Thiel Macro LLC, has significantly cut its position in Tesla (TSLA), according to a new Q3 2025 13F filing.
Thiel, who is close to Musk, is retreating from his Tesla investment at a time when the CEO told shareholders to “hold on” to their stocks and warned TSLA shorts.
The filing, which covers the period ending September 30, shows the fund sold 207,613 TSLA shares during the quarter.
This reduces its stake by over 76%, from 272,613 shares at the end of Q2 to just 65,000 shares remaining.
Thiel famously co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk and is still close to Tesla’s CEO. They have both recently referenced having conversations, and they collaborated in their support of President Trump in last year’s US elections, as well as during the transition.
Interestingly, Thiel appears to be ignoring his friend’s advice in divesting from Tesla. As Tesla shareholders voted to give Musk the biggest CEO compensation package ever, Musk told them to “hold on to their stocks.”
Just this past weekend, Musk issued a specific warning to those betting against Tesla’s stock, and specifically Bill Gates, via a post on X (formerly Twitter), regarding Gates’ long-held short position against Tesla. Responding to news that the Gates Foundation was selling Microsoft stock, Musk posted:
“If Gates hasn’t fully closed out the crazy short position he has held against Tesla for ~8 years, he had better do so soon.”
The sale of Tesla stocks wasn’t the most significant move in Thiel’s latest filing.
The fund’s most significant move was exiting its entire stake in Nvidia (NVDA), selling over 537,000 shares, a position that had been its largest. Thiel Macro also completely sold off its holdings in Vistra Energy.
This appears to be a major consolidation and a pivot away from high-growth momentum stocks. In their place, the fund added new, more traditional “Big Tech” positions, namely in Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT).
The aggressive sales shrank the fund’s total reported US equity value from $212 million down to just $74.4 million.
Electrek’s Take
To be fair, Thiel’s overall rebalancing appears to stem more from broader market fear than from anything specific about Tesla.
However, it does highlight that Tesla’s volatile stock is risky amid a potential market pullback.
It currently trades at a 275 price-to-earnings ratio, which is expected to keep rising this quarter, even if the stock continues to drop from its recent high, as earnings are expected to decline further in Q4.
Now, this is not financial advice, but I think it’s worth noting that even though Tesla’s stock hasn’t been linked to its fundamentals in a while, its most significant stock price growth occurred during its period of earnings growth.
These days, it’s hard to imagine Tesla going back to earnings growth any time soon.
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