Bitcoin Backer Peter Thiel's Thiel Macro Buys 495,000 Amazon Shares in $418M Push

Thiel Macro Returns to Equities

Thiel Macro, the investment vehicle of PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, has jumped back into public equities — and its single largest new position is Amazon (AMZN). The fund's latest quarterly disclosure shows it deployed more than $418 million across eight stocks in the most recent quarter, after holding no equities at all for the prior two quarters. The headline allocation: 495,000 Amazon shares, a stake that now accounts for 28% of Thiel Macro's entire equity portfolio and makes the e-commerce and cloud giant the fund's top holding.

The remainder of the fresh capital went into Vista Energy, Vistra Corp. and American Electric Power Co., a cluster of energy and utility names that market observers link directly to the surging electricity demand from AI datacenter buildouts — the same infrastructure push driving valuations across mega-cap tech names like Apple (AAPL) and its peers.

Amazon itself brings the fundamentals to justify the bet. The company's annual revenue has climbed past $716 billion, and its in-house AI chip business crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue in the latest quarter, growing at a triple-digit percentage rate year over year. Chief executive Andy Jassy has told investors that customers choose AWS because it offers the broadest set of features, and the company is also applying AI across its e-commerce logistics network to cut costs while expanding datacenter capacity. Thiel has not publicly explained why Amazon took the top slot, but analysts point out the stock trades at roughly 20 times next year's expected earnings — a modest multiple for a business that has risen more than 200,000% since its 1997 IPO, with AWS and the AI segment widely viewed as the key swing factors for the shares ahead.

Kalanick's Atoms Targets Robotaxis

While Thiel is buying into AI incumbents, another PayPal-era founder is building an AI challenger of his own. Atoms, the robotics startup controlled by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, is preparing to enter the robotaxi market, according to reporting by the Financial Times. The company, which completed a $1.7 billion raise this summer, is gearing up for a large-scale hiring drive and an acquisition offensive aimed at becoming a major player in autonomous driving.

The report reveals that Atoms has held talks with Uber about deploying its self-driving taxi technology on the ride-hailing giant's platform — a natural fit given Uber's long list of autonomous-vehicle partnerships. Uber has also invested $100 million in Atoms, a stake previously confirmed by TechCrunch. Sources stressed that robotaxis are not the entirety of Atoms' plan, but the direction aligns with Kalanick's description of the raise as funding unfinished business at the company he founded.

The autonomous ambitions were telegraphed earlier: Atoms acquired Pronto, a self-driving mining startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Uber's self-driving unit who was sentenced to 18 months over trade-secret theft before receiving a pardon from President Trump. The move injects a deep-pocketed newcomer into a robotaxi race that is already tightening, with Tesla's Cybercab formally unveiled in September and Waymo continuing its geographic expansion. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

PayPal-Founder Capital Chases AI

Read together, the two moves sketch a clear arc: the PayPal founder cohort is steering enormous pools of private and public capital into AI infrastructure and autonomy, a rotation our desk is tracking across both equity and contract trading markets. The bear market has not slowed this flow — Thiel's AI-linked equity re-entry and Kalanick's round, per the official funding announcement, a $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz with the valuation left undisclosed, confirm institutional conviction. Thiel, one of Bitcoin's earliest high-profile backers, has historically rotated profits between tech and Bitcoin; watch whether crypto markets become a downstream beneficiary of this AI-era wealth effect, a trend investors can position for via the Best Crypto Exchanges as liquidity shifts.