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Billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC, reported two significant sales in its 13F filing for the quarter ending September 30, 2025.
First, the fund sold its entire stake in NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), approximately 537,742 shares valued at approximately $100 million at the time of the filing. That’s a head scratcher. But it gets more interesting.
Thiel’s hedge fund also trimmed its position in Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA). It was actually more of a buzzcut than a trim. The fund cut its stake by approximately 76%. In total, Thiel Macro reduced the size of its position from $212 million at the end of the prior quarter to $74.4 million.
Whenever investors see a move like this, they take notice. Thiel may not command the same kind of aura as Warren Buffett, but the co-founder of PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) and Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) has earned a certain cache with retail investors.
So investors should take a moment to understand why Thiel made the moves it did and if it signals a bigger rotation out of technology stocks.
The Only Problem with Bubbles Is That They Burst
Since the end of the last earnings season, the whispers of an AI bubble have grown louder.
However, at that point, the concern was mostly about lofty valuations. Analysts have suggested that evaluating many of these companies by standards like the price-to-earnings (P/E) or price-to-sales (P/S) ratios may not accurately reflect the true value of the business.
Thiel has said on multiple occasions that the hype of AI was growing faster than the financial value of any one company.
He compares the current period to the dot-com boom that turned bust when investors realized that the significant technological transformations brought about by the internet would take years to come to fruition.
According to this view, investors should be wary of overstating near-term financial returns from groundbreaking technologies.
Is the same realization happening with the AI boom? NVIDIA’s latest earnings report would suggest otherwise. The company beat on the top and bottom lines and says demand for its Blackwell GPUs is “off the charts.”
That means the run in AI stocks like NVDA and TSLA may have further to run. If so, Thiel got out early. However, if the AI bubble does burst, it’s better to be early than late.
Institutional Moves Signal Market Sentiment Shifts
As much as retail investors might like to believe otherwise, the moves we make in our respective stock positions speak to sentiment, but they won’t really move the needle for stocks like NVIDIA and Tesla.
That requires the “big money” from institutional investors like Thiel Macro.
Regarding NVIDIA—a company that Thiel has long touted for its dominance in AI hardware— selling $100 million in NVDA stock is not insignificant. While it’s not enough to move a megacap’s price by itself, it is meaningful because it reflects changing institutional sentiment.
Should Investors Follow Thiel’s Lead?
Thiel’s activity is newsworthy. But does it mean you should follow suit? The answer is likely to be different for every investor. Objectively speaking, NVDA and other stocks like it, including Thiel’s old company, Palantir, are expensive to own. As the saying goes, nobody got broke taking a profit.
But the investors who did the best in stocks like Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) were the ones who held strong even when the dot-com bubble burst. NVIDIA and Tesla have delivered generational returns for patient investors. In both cases, there may be more growth to come.
It appears that Thiel, for now, is content to wait for a more favorable entry point.
For retail investors, the key is determining whether your investment thesis has changed. If it hasn’t, short-term volatility could simply present an opportunity to buy high-quality tech stocks at more favorable valuations.
