Apple, Facebook, Alphabet: Billionaires Have Spoken And This Is Their Favorite Tech Stock

#3 Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)

– Number of Billionaires With Long Positions (as of June 30): 19
– Aggregate Value of Billionaires’ Holdings (as of June 30): $9.55 billion

Amazon ranks third, as 19 billionaires were long the stock at the end of June, an increase of three quarter-over-quarter. Steve Cohen invested some of the money from that sold off Apple position into Amazon, as his family office added 536,020 Amazon shares to its portfolio during the quarter. Ken Griffin and Chase Coleman (Tiger Global Management) also added large chunks of shares to their holdings, while Israel Englander (Millennium Management) opened a new position of 411,621 shares.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been a strong performing e-commerce stock this year, having posted gains of 13%. While Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT) is investing billions in an attempt to close the e-commerce gap with Amazon, including through its recent $3 billion purchase of Jet.com, many analysts aren’t convinced that the move will do much to help Wal-Mart’s cause. For one, Amazon has a greater than 50-million-subscriber headstart for its fast shipping platform in the U.S., with Wal-Mart recently having launched a cheaper version (though with less features) of its own. Amazon is also well ahead in its efforts to make drone deliveries a reality, which could prove to be pivotal.

#2 Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)

– Number of Billionaires With Long Positions (as of June 30): 20
– Aggregate Value of Billionaires’ Holdings (as of June 30): $7.04 billion

Facebook lands at number two with the same number of billionaire shareholders of its stock as it had a quarter earlier: 20. Billionaire Dan Loeb (Third Point) opened a huge new Facebook position during the second quarter, consisting of 3.75 million shares, while Ray Dalio (Bridgewater Associates) sold off 63% of his Facebook position, leaving it with 23,600 shares.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) only seems to be picking up more and more steam with each passing quarter. The dominant social network added 15% more users year-over-year during the second quarter to reach 1.71 billion monthly active users, or about 23% of the world’s population. Even more impressive is the fact that the revenue the company is generating from each user is also increasing by leaps and bounds, rising by 38.4% during the quarter. Of some concern is that Facebook registered mild daily and monthly user dips quarter-over-quarter in North America and Europe. Ad load growth is also slowing, with J.P. Morgan anticipating declines in each of the next two years.

#1 Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

– Number of Billionaires With Long Positions (as of June 30): 22
– Aggregate Value of Billionaires’ Holdings (as of June 30): $7.73 billion

Microsoft tops the list of billionaires’ favorite tech stocks, with the total number of such shareholders jumping by five over the second quarter to 22. Some of the billionaires to go long Microsoft during the quarter were Julian Robertson (Tiger Management), Michael Hintze (CQS Cayman), and Andreas Halvorsen (Viking Global). The quant funds run by billionaires Jim Simons and Ken Griffin also made huge additions to their Microsoft holdings during the quarter.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has not disappointed the score of new billionaire investors thus far, gaining over 13% in the third quarter and hitting its all-time high. Like Amazon and Alphabet, Microsoft also has a burgeoning cloud platform, Azure, one that could even supplant Amazon’s AWS as the leader in the cloud IaaS market thanks to its hybrid cloud model. In July, Microsoft announced that General Electric Company (NYSE:GE)’s Predix platform would be made available on Azure, allowing industrial businesses to make greater use of the data culled from their machines.

Disclosure: None