Why Billionaires Keep Betting on Uber — Even as the Stock Stalls

Uber has become one of the most crowded high-conviction trades among elite investors — and one of the more frustrating ones. The stock is down over the past year even as several of the world's best-known money managers hold it as a top position. With Uber's Q2 2026 earnings call set for August 5, it's worth looking at what the 13F data actually shows and why the smart money hasn't blinked.

Who Owns Uber, and How Much

The Q1 2026 13F filings (holdings as of March 31) show a striking concentration of billionaire capital in Uber:

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square remains the flagship holder. Ackman began building his position in early 2025, ultimately accumulating around 30 million shares, and Uber still sits as Pershing Square's largest disclosed equity position at just over 20% of the reported portfolio. Ackman has called Uber "one of the best managed and highest quality businesses in the world" — and argued it trades at a "massive discount to its intrinsic value."

David Tepper's Appaloosa holds Uber alongside its heavyweight Amazon and Alphabet stakes, part of a broader pattern where the most concentrated hedge fund portfolios keep crowding into the same handful of mega-cap platform businesses.

Li Lu's Himalaya Capital — the value investor Charlie Munger famously trusted with his family's money — also counts Uber among its few large holdings, notable because Himalaya runs one of the most concentrated books tracked on our investors page.

When managers with this little stylistic overlap — an activist, a macro trader, and a Munger-school value investor — converge on one name, that's exactly the kind of signal our overlap tool is built to surface.

Why the Stock Has Lagged Anyway

Conviction hasn't been rewarded lately. Uber shares slipped again this week as two execution risks weighed on sentiment: AI-linked job cuts and the $14.8 billion Delivery Hero acquisition, a deal big enough to reshape the delivery segment — and to strain the balance sheet if integration goes badly.

Then there's the robotaxi question. Uber's strategy is to be the demand and fleet-management layer for multiple autonomous-vehicle developers rather than building self-driving technology itself. It's a capital-light approach with real appeal. But Waymo — the largest robotaxi operator, running more than 3,000 driverless cars and roughly half a million paid rides per week — routes most of those rides through its own app, not Uber's. If the biggest AV player doesn't need Uber's network, the platform thesis gets harder.

The Bull Case the 13Fs Are Pricing

So why are Ackman, Tepper, and Li Lu still holding? The valuation math is hard to ignore. Uber currently passes essentially every standard valuation check comparing price to fundamentals, and Wall Street's consensus rating sits at Strong Buy with a mean price target near $107 — implying roughly 45% upside from recent levels.

The bulls' argument runs like this: Uber's core mobility and delivery businesses are compounding cash flow regardless of how the robotaxi race resolves. If autonomy arrives slowly, Uber keeps taking its cut of human-driven rides. If it arrives quickly through multiple AV developers, Uber's network becomes the aggregation layer most of them need to fill their fleets. Waymo is the exception, not necessarily the rule.

That's a classic "heads I win, tails I don't lose much" setup — precisely the asymmetry value-oriented concentrated investors hunt for.

What to Watch on August 5

Uber reports Q2 2026 results on August 5. Three things matter for the 13F crowd: mobility bookings growth (the core engine), any update on Delivery Hero deal financing and integration, and commentary on AV partnerships beyond the headlines. A strong quarter could validate the crowded positioning; a weak one tests how patient this capital really is.

Remember the timing caveat: current 13F data reflects March 31 holdings. Whether these managers added, trimmed, or held through the recent weakness won't be visible until Q2 filings land by August 14 — which is exactly when our flow tracker becomes most useful for spotting position changes across the whole tracked universe.

Crowded trades cut both ways. Concentration from great investors is a genuine signal, but it also means the exits get narrow if the thesis cracks. Uber heading into this earnings print — widely held, cheaply valued, and facing real execution questions — is one of the more interesting setups on the board. You can see how it fits into the broader positioning picture on our macro consensus page.

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Data sourced from public SEC 13F filings. Educational research only — not investment advice.