Billionaire's AI Play Under Fire: Ackman Just Dumped 9.7% of His Alphabet Stake—Here's What the Street Thinks

Bill Ackman just made a move that has Wall Street scratching their heads. The billionaire hedge fund manager trimmed his Pershing Square position in Alphabet Class A by 9.7% in Q3 2025—offloading over 519,000 shares.

The timing? Weird. Alphabet just crushed earnings with 33% YoY profit growth to $35B, and Google Cloud is firing on all cylinders thanks to the AI tailwind. Google Search revenue is accelerating with AI Overviews, and Gemini LLM hit 650M monthly active users.

Wall Street's take: Ackman probably just locked in profits. Why else would he sell when 57 out of 66 analysts covering Alphabet rate it a "buy" or "strong buy," with zero sell recommendations? Only 9 analysts suggest holding.

But here's the thing—Pershing Square still holds 11M+ Class A and Class B shares worth ~$3.3B. Ackman hasn't dumped the stock entirely, so this might just be portfolio rebalancing, not a vote of no confidence.

The real question: Is this a sign the AI rally in mega-cap tech is getting too frothy, or did the king of contrarian investing just make his first real AI bet mistake? Your take?