Billionaire DE Shaw’s Top 5 Stock Picks

4. Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA)

DE Shaw’s Stake Value: $1.1 billion

Percentage of DE Shaw’s 13F Portfolio: 0.94%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 60

Originated in 2003 and spearheaded in Palo Alto, California, Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) cements itself as fourth on our list of billionaire DE Shaw’s top 10 stock picks according to analysts. The firm operates within the automobile industry.

By June 30, 60 hedge funds out of the 873 funds tracked by Insider Monkey held stakes in the company worth $9.3 billion.

Here is what Worm Capital has to say about Tesla, Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:

“Tesla underperformed in the quarter, but we maintain our high conviction in the long-term thesis on each business model. Much like art or writing, investment research is a continuous process—it never really ends. Prices can move in either direction in any given quarter, but our advantage often comes from knowing the businesses so well that short-term fluctuations in pricing shouldn’t affect our decision-making. On high conviction positions, this patience is often rewarded, which is why research is so valuable to our process…

..Tesla is in a class of its own. What many in the market seem to (still) not understand is that Tesla is not a car company so much as a complex manufacturing firm—with significant recurring software potential—growing, in our view, at a targeted rate of 50-100% YoY over the next several years. Unlike any other automotive firm in existence today, Tesla alone is a vertically integrated hardware and software business developing state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques that will revolutionize the auto industry (i.e. its Giga Presses, 4680 cells, etc.). It is a generational company and we anticipate it will eventually be the largest company in the world. Many of the conventional narratives around competition displacing Tesla’s lead are fundamentally flawed, and the many headlines surrounding Tesla’s approach to autonomy are frustratingly superficial. (As an aside, we highly recommend watching Andrej Karpathy’s, Tesla’s head of AI, his recent presentation from June: “Tesla details its self-driving Supercomputer that will bring in the Dojo era”)”