Uber's stock is having its best two-day run since 2023. Why Bill Ackman is a believer.

MW Uber's stock is having its best two-day run since 2023. Why Bill Ackman is a believer.

By Emily Bary and Tomi Kilgore

Ackman's Pershing Square hedge fund has been buying Uber stock since early January, and now owns 1.4% of outstanding shares

Uber Technologies Inc.'s stock is continuing its comeback following Bill Ackman's disclosure that his Pershing Square investment fund now owns 30.3 million shares of the ride-hailing company.

"We believe that Uber is one of the best managed and highest quality businesses in the world," Ackman said in a Friday post on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Remarkably, it can still be purchased at a massive discount to its intrinsic value."

He praised Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi, who he said "has done a superb job in transforming the company into a highly profitable and cash-generative growth machine." Pershing began building its Uber stake in early January.

Based on Uber's latest quarterly filing, 30.3 million shares would represent 1.4% of the company's outstanding shares. That would make Pershing Square the 12th-largest shareholder, according to FactSet data.

Uber shares $(UBER)$ fell after its earnings report Wednesday morning, which brought concerns about booking trends. But shares were up 8% in afternoon trading Friday and up 17.2% across the past two trading sessions. That puts them on track for their best two-day run since a 17.6% ascent in the stretch that ended May 2, 2023.

The stock has been on a wild ride in recent years. It surged 149% in 2023 and continued racking up gains across part of 2024. But it saw a sharp pullback at the end of last year as investors began to worry about competition in the race to develop robotaxi technology, and it ended 2024 roughly flat.

Uber investors are cheering the endorsement of a high-profile investor like Ackman, who recently made LCH Investments' annual list of the top 20 money managers of all time. Pershing Square was 20th on the list, with a $20.2 billion net gain since inception in 2004.

Read: These hedge-fund legends beat their peers. But a simple model beat them.

But Ackman has also had some bad calls. He basically lost a public "feud" with fellow hotshot investor Carl Icahn about a decade ago, in which Ackman made a big bet that Herbalife Inc.'s stock $(HLF)$ would fall, while Icahn bet that it would rise. Ackman eventually called uncle, and exited his short bet in early 2018.

Uber shares have dropped 12.5% from their record close of $86.34 reached on Oct. 11, 2024. They're up 25% so far in 2025.

-Emily Bary -Tomi Kilgore

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February 07, 2025 14:23 ET (19:23 GMT)

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