Ackman Sold Alphabet and Bought Toll Booths: Inside Pershing Square's Q2 2026 Pivot

The Q2 2026 13F deadline passed on August 14, and the headline most outlets ran with was Berkshire's Alphabet stake growing more than sevenfold. That's the loud story. The quieter one — and arguably the more interesting one — is that Bill Ackman went the other direction entirely.

Pershing Square's Q2 filing shows the portfolio expanding from 10 positions to 14, with reported assets around $19.5 billion. Alphabet was fully exited. In its place: brand-new stakes in Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global, and Netflix. Two of the world's largest managers looked at the same quarter and drew opposite conclusions about the same stock.

What Actually Changed

Ackman runs one of the most concentrated books among large 13F filers, so going from 10 names to 14 is not a rounding error. It's a roughly 40% increase in the number of things he's willing to own at all.

The top of the portfolio still looks familiar. Uber sits at roughly 12.7% of disclosed value, Brookfield at about 12.6%, and Microsoft near 11.9%. Amazon rounds out the upper tier. Those are conviction positions he's held and defended publicly.

What's new is the tier beneath them. Visa and Mastercard came in at roughly $1.12 billion and $1.09 billion respectively — each meaningful but neither large enough to displace the core. S&P Global and Netflix joined alongside them. Universal Music Group was divested after a rejected takeover bid, which reads as a situation-specific exit rather than a thematic one.

You can compare the before-and-after directly on the Bill Ackman investor page.

The Common Thread

Visa, Mastercard, and S&P Global are not obviously similar businesses. One processes card transactions, one processes card transactions, and one rates debt and licenses indices. But they share a structural feature that matters more than sector classification: all three collect a small fee on activity they don't have to fund, forecast, or take inventory risk on.

Visa and Mastercard clip basis points on payment volume without holding credit risk. S&P Global earns on debt issuance and on index licensing — money that flows whether the underlying assets go up or down. These are toll booths. They don't need the traffic to be going anywhere in particular; they just need it to keep moving.

That's a different bet than owning Alphabet, where the return depends on winning a capital-intensive AI race against three other well-funded competitors. Ackman didn't sell Alphabet because he thinks search is dying. The more plausible read is that he found places to put capital where the outcome depends less on who wins.

Reading This Against the Broader Quarter

The Q2 filings as a group did not show wholesale de-risking. The dominant pattern was rotation within growth — managers recycling capital out of prior winners and into semis, hyperscalers, and AI infrastructure. AI stayed the theme; the expression of it changed.

Ackman's move sits slightly outside that pattern. He didn't rotate from one AI name to another. He rotated out of an AI name into businesses whose economics have very little to do with model training runs. Netflix is the partial exception — a growth name, but one with a subscription base rather than a capex arms race.

Whether other managers made similar moves is worth checking rather than assuming. The overlap tool shows which names multiple tracked investors hold simultaneously, and flow shows the aggregate direction of buying and selling by position. If payment networks are a genuine emerging consensus rather than one manager's idiosyncratic call, it will show up there.

The Caveats That Always Apply

13F filings report positions as of June 30. It is now late August. Ackman has had seven weeks to change his mind, and concentrated managers change their minds faster than most.

The forms also disclose only long US equity positions. Options, shorts, foreign listings, and cash are invisible. Pershing Square in particular has historically used derivatives in size, so the equity snapshot may understate or overstate what he's actually exposed to.

And the reflex to copy a famous investor's new position is usually a bad one. Ackman's Q2 stakes were built at Q2 prices with a Q2 thesis and a holding period he hasn't disclosed. You'd be entering two months later on incomplete information.

The more useful takeaway isn't which four tickers he bought. It's that a manager known for concentrated, high-conviction bets chose to widen his book — and did it by adding businesses that earn regardless of which technology narrative wins. For context on how that fits with broader institutional positioning, the macro consensus view aggregates directional signals across tracked investors.

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