George Soros is shifting his bets on the future of electric vehicles. Soros, who had been a big investor in nascent startups like Lucid and Rivian, has begun offloading his shares in Rivian, and is moving into more established manufacturers Tesla and Ford.
In a regulatory filing with the SEC, Soros Fund Management revealed it had purchased 29,883 shares of Tesla, valued at just over $20 million as of June 30th. However since then, Tesla stock has jumped 34%. It is Soros’ first investment in the electric car maker.
Soros also bought 29.5 million Ford shares, indicating he may have been taken by CEO Jim Farley’s strategy of splitting the carmaker up into separate entities. Under Farley’s plan, internal combustion operations will be run by a division called Ford Blue. Another division, called Ford Model e, will be responsible for Ford’s electric vehicle operations. Its goal is to produce 2 million EVs by 2026. It is an ambitious goal, given Ford has only sold 27,140 EVs in 2021.
At the same time, Soros reduced his exposure to carmaker Rivian, reducing his holdings from 25.88 million shares in his last filing in March, to 17.835 million Rivian shares as of August 12th. This follows disastrous performance by the carmaker as it has battled rising commodity prices and persistent supply chain issues. Having set a goal of producing 25,000 vehicles this year, the company has only produced 6,954 cars so far.
Stock market rules require any fund manager with more than $100 million in US equities file a form 13F within 45 days of the end of the quarter listing all the stocks they hold which trade on US exchanges.
Soros’ US equity portfolio rose in value 5.3% over the quarter to $5.6 billion.