George Soros Bolsters Stakes in Big Tech, Snaps up Surging Amazon, Google & Tesla Shares

Soros Fund Management, formerly a New York-based hedge fund formed in 1970 by Hungarian-American investor George Soros, purchased 53 new stocks in the first fiscal quarter of 2022, with investments focused in the real estate, information technology, healthcare, finance, consumer discretionary, and communications sectors.

Soros Fund Management (SFM), the principal asset manager for the Open Society Foundations (OSF), has bolstered its stakes in leading big tech companies, according to a regulatory filing made on Friday.

Money managers are required to file a 13F form within 45 days of the end of each quarter to list their holdings in stocks trading on US exchanges.

Thus, the private American investment management firm founded back in 1970 by billionaire "philanthropist" George Soros snapped up a batch of tech stocks ahead of their sharp rally in recent weeks.

The New York-based SFM boosted its stakes in three top-ten-ranking technology companies as of the end of June: Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce Inc., and Alphabet Inc., among others.

Other new stock picks included a $20 million position in Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. The 30,000 shares in the automotive and energy company currently represent about 0.4% of the $4.6 billion US equities portfolio of the philanthropist, whose personal wealth is estimated at $8.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Soros’ fund also added to its existing stakes in electric vehicle (EV) makers Lucid Group Inc. and Nio Inc.

Other new additions included $168 million worth of stocks in the Alleghany Corp. investment company, focused on the insurance business, and $201.5 million in shares of American Campus Communities Inc., the nation's largest developer, owner, and manager of high-quality student housing apartment communities.

Tech stocks have surged after hitting a low point during the market selloff in the first half of 2022. Since then, the tech sector has jumped nearly 20%, as investors have been prompted to buy up shares after the second-quarter earnings season was hailed as a “major victory” for tech companies.

Everything from spending and consumer demand to digital advertising did “much better than feared, given the white-knuckle backdrop,” according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, cited by Bloomberg.

Apple and Amazon have surged approximately 30% in the last two months and were credited as being the best performers in the sector. Netflix and Tesla shares have risen 40% and 37%, respectively.

Overall, US stocks have advanced for the fourth consecutive week since entering a bear market earlier this year.

George Soros’s investment firm managed more than $28 billion as of the beginning of 2022, including public and private equity. The American billionaire investor and "philanthropist," 92, is known for his lavish donations to political causes.

Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF) have been criticized across the political spectrum for doling out large amounts of cash on questionable "civil society initiatives" in dozens of countries in the Third World and the post-Soviet space as part of efforts to spread his vision of a “globalized, socially liberal, market-driven world order.”

Soros’ prolific activity has since been denounced as a form of unwanted interference in their internal affairs by some nations. Russia banned the OSF’s operations in 2015 after Moscow deemed them to be a threat to national security. In 2018, his native Hungary booted the Soros-backed Central European University out of the country.