Two of the most closely watched investors in the world have taken opposite sides on the same stock. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway slashed its Amazon position by 77% in the fourth quarter of 2025, while Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management increased its Amazon stake by 65% during the same three-month window. The split, surfaced through publicly filed 13F disclosures and continuing to drive coverage through the April 26–27 reporting cycle, offers one of the cleanest contrasts in recent memory between two billionaire investing styles.
What the Filings Show
According to Berkshire Hathaway’s Q4 2025 13F filing, Buffett sold approximately 7.7 million Amazon shares — roughly $1.7 billion worth — reducing the position by 77%. Amazon now represents about 0.1% of Berkshire’s overall portfolio. Buffett initially purchased the stock in the first quarter of 2019, meaning the position has been part of Berkshire’s holdings for roughly seven years before this latest reduction.
Pershing Square Capital Management moved in the opposite direction. Ackman’s fund grew its Amazon position by 65% during the same Q4 2025 quarter, raising the stake to 9.6 million shares worth approximately $2.2 billion. Amazon now represents 14% of Pershing Square’s portfolio and is the fund’s third-largest position. Ackman first bought Amazon in the second quarter of 2025 and stayed pat through the third quarter before adding aggressively in Q4.
Pershing Square’s broader allocation now leans heavily into AI-adjacent megacaps. Uber, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms together make up 55% of the fund’s portfolio, with Amazon at 14%, Uber at 16%, and the remaining two filling out the rest of that exposure.
Two Investing Philosophies, One Stock
Buffett is widely identified with classic value investing — buying high-quality companies for less than they appear worth and holding for the long term. His track record at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway has produced market-beating returns across six decades.
Ackman has built his reputation as an activist investor willing to take concentrated positions and make daring moves. Pershing Square has delivered a 17% annualized average return over the past decade, compared to 14% for the S&P 500, according to publicly reported performance data.
Both investors share a value lens. The split on Amazon is therefore less about disagreeing on the company’s fundamentals and more about where each fund sits in its own holding cycle, capital deployment plan, and risk appetite for a stock with an active AI investment thesis baked into its valuation.
The AI Backdrop
Amazon’s place in the artificial intelligence conversation has shaped both investors’ calculus. While the company is most often associated with e-commerce, the bulk of Amazon’s profit comes from cloud computing through Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the segment offering customers a full portfolio of AI products and services.
That AI exposure helped Amazon shares climb in the triple digits over the past three years. But late in 2025 and into the early part of 2026, investor sentiment cooled. Concerns surfaced that hyperscaler tech companies, including Amazon, may be over-spending on AI infrastructure relative to the revenue opportunity ahead.
The pullback is the backdrop that frames both moves. Buffett trimmed into the AI uncertainty. Ackman bought into it.
“Ignore the Bears”
Ackman has not specifically explained the Amazon purchase in a public statement. But just weeks before the Q4 2025 filing surfaced, with growth stocks under pressure, Ackman posted on X that it was a fantastic time to buy quality stocks while many were trading at bargain prices. His message to investors: “ignore the bears.”
That posture aligns with the activist investor’s repeated pattern of buying into dislocated quality names when the broader market loses conviction. By the time Pershing Square’s filing surfaced, Amazon had begun to recover. The stock is now up roughly 10% year-to-date, trading around $261 per share, with sentiment continuing to improve as Amazon’s most recent shareholder letter emphasized that its AI capital expenditure is being deployed against concrete demand rather than speculative future demand.
Why Buffett May Have Sold
Buffett’s reasoning, as is typical, has not been spelled out publicly. The most common interpretation among market observers is that Buffett may have been locking in long-running gains from a 2019 entry point, freeing up capital to redeploy into other sectors. Berkshire’s position size — already small relative to its portfolio — also meant that maintaining the stake offered limited upside relative to the conglomerate’s broader allocation strategy.
It is also worth noting that Buffett did not exit Amazon entirely. The 77% cut leaves a residual position in Berkshire’s books, meaning Amazon remains a holding in the portfolio of one of the most influential investors in the world.
What It Means for Wealth-Trackers
For investors tracking billionaire moves, the key takeaway is not that one of the two has it right and the other has it wrong. Both have built durable track records using different methodologies, and both still hold Amazon — just at radically different concentration levels.
Buffett has been an Amazon shareholder for nearly seven years. Cutting the stake meaningfully after a long run of gains is consistent with his pattern of trimming long-held positions to redeploy capital. Ackman, having entered the position less than a year ago, is positioned to benefit from what he appears to view as Amazon’s next leg of growth in cloud and AI.
For ambitious investors building or tracking wealth, the lesson sits in the framing rather than the imitation. Buffett’s move says: take profits, stay disciplined, redeploy. Ackman’s move says: lean into dislocation, concentrate behind conviction. The two are not contradictory investing principles — they are different stages of the same long-term capital allocation cycle.
And on the one question that matters most, both billionaires still agree: Amazon remains a stock worth owning. They simply disagree on how much.
