Bill Ackman Buys 5.65 Million Microsoft Shares, Exits Alphabet
bill ackman said Pershing Square built a 5.65 million-share position in Microsoft during the first quarter and used a full exit from Alphabet to fund it. He disclosed the trade on X on May 15 and said the Alphabet sale was not a wager against the company.
The move shifts capital from one large technology holding to another at a time when investors are weighing cloud growth and AI exposure. Ackman said Pershing Square was buying Microsoft at about 21 times forward earnings after a sell-off in February opened the entry point.
Ackman’s Microsoft Entry
Ackman said Pershing Square started accumulating Microsoft shares in February after the company’s fiscal second-quarter report triggered a sharp sell-off. He said the fund built the position through the first quarter, ending March 31, 2026, with a stake that reached 5.65 million shares.
He also said Microsoft 365 is tightly integrated into the daily workflow of nearly every large enterprise. Ackman said Microsoft’s roughly 27% economic interest in OpenAI was worth about $200 billion, giving the stock a second layer of exposure beyond the core software business.
Microsoft’s own fiscal third quarter ended March 31, 2026, with Azure growth of 39% in constant currency, total revenue of $82.9 billion and commercial backlog of $627 billion. Microsoft said the annualized run rate of its AI business hit $37 billion.
Alphabet Sale For Microsoft
On May 16, Ackman said Pershing Square had fully exited its multi-year long investment in Alphabet. He said, “To be clear, our sale of $GOOG was not a bet against the company.”
He added, “We are very bullish long term on Alphabet. But at current valuations and in light of our finite capital base, we used $GOOG as a source of funds for $MSFT.” That explanation makes the trade a capital allocation choice, not a change in his long-term view of Alphabet.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Cloud accelerated again this quarter due to strong demand for our AI products and infrastructure,” during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. Alphabet said Google Cloud revenue surged 63% year over year to $20 billion and backlog nearly doubled sequentially to more than $460 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
Microsoft And Alphabet Valuations
The filing also lands as the two companies remain central to investor attention on cloud and AI. Microsoft was down about 14% year to date at the time of the article, while Alphabet was up 23% year to date and the source described it as one of the market’s clearest artificial intelligence winners this year.
Amazon’s AWS grew 28% year over year in the first quarter, adding another benchmark for how the largest cloud providers are being measured. For readers tracking Pershing Square, the practical takeaway is straightforward: Ackman moved money from one long-held technology name into another, and he did it with a stated valuation and capital constraint in mind.
