Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Builds New $1.1 Billion Visa Stake

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square disclosed a new Visa position worth $1.12 billion at the end of the second quarter, placing the payments company among the investment firm’s largest newly revealed holdings. The June 30 position consisted of 3,270,470 Visa Class A shares with a reported market value of $1,122,065,552.

At that size, Visa sits alongside several other billion-dollar additions to Pershing’s disclosed U.S. equity portfolio. Mastercard was valued at about $1.09 billion, S&P Global at about $1.06 billion and Netflix at roughly $934 million at quarter-end. Pershing has described all four companies as new investments, part of a broader expansion of a portfolio that has traditionally remained concentrated in a relatively small number of businesses.

Pershing Square Inc. submitted the Form 13F information table on August 14. The filing reported $19.47 billion of 13F securities across 15 line items and listed Pershing Square Capital Management among six other included managers. That reporting structure is important when comparing the filing with earlier quarter forms, because the June report covers Pershing Square Inc. together with the managers named on the filing.

Visa joins a broader reshaping of Pershing’s portfolio

Visa is one part of a wider set of additions disclosed by Pershing Square Holdings. In its 2026 interim report, the firm said it had established six new investments: Visa, Mastercard, Netflix, S&P Global, Intercontinental Exchange and Alcon. Management said it had followed the companies for years and moved when valuations fell below its estimates of intrinsic value.

Not every one of those six names appears in the June 30 13F. Pershing’s interim materials say the Intercontinental Exchange and Alcon positions were initiated after quarter-end, which explains their absence from the filing. Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global and Netflix were already in the disclosed book by June 30, giving the quarter-end report an unusually visible cluster of fresh positions around the $1 billion mark.

Pershing’s portfolio remains concentrated even after the additions. Uber, Brookfield, Microsoft and Amazon were each reported at more than $2 billion at June 30, while Restaurant Brands and Meta were also larger than the Visa position. The new payment and financial-data holdings broaden the list of core ideas without turning the portfolio into a widely diversified, index-like collection of stocks.

Ackman and Chief Investment Officer Ryan Israel described an investment framework built around businesses with predictable operations, free cash flow, strong competitive positions and limited dependence on financial leverage or capital markets. Visa fits that profile in Pershing’s view because the company operates a global payment network rather than lending directly to cardholders.

Why Pershing says Visa fits its investment model

Pershing grouped Visa and Mastercard together as what it called the “Card Networks.” The firm described both as capital-light businesses that collect a small fee when payments move across their networks without taking the same credit exposure borne by card-issuing banks. It also highlighted the scale of the networks, which connect consumers, merchants and financial institutions across many markets.

Services layered on top of the core network are another part of the thesis. Pershing estimates that value-added services account for about 30% of Visa’s revenue and are growing faster than the payments business. In the firm’s view, that mix gives Visa an additional source of growth beyond the volume of payments moving across its network.

Payment-network valuations have also reflected concern about possible disruption from stablecoins, AI-driven commerce and proposed U.S. regulation. Pershing said it considers those worries overstated. Its argument is that stablecoins are more likely to expand into areas where cards are less established, while Visa and Mastercard can participate in the technology through settlement, linked-card and other infrastructure products.

Visa’s recent product activity shows that the company is trying to position itself inside that shift rather than ignore it. In July, Visa announced an enterprise platform for financial institutions and fintechs to mint, move and manage stablecoins, and earlier in the year it expanded a stablecoin settlement pilot across additional blockchains. Those initiatives do not prove Pershing’s investment case, but they support the narrower point that Visa is treating tokenized money as a product and network opportunity as well as a competitive risk.

Valuation remains central to Ackman’s case. Pershing’s June 30 portfolio update put Visa at 23 times its estimate of next-12-month earnings and projected roughly 16% annualized earnings-per-share growth over the following three to five years. Those are Pershing’s forecasts, not Visa guidance, and they depend on the firm being right about both operating growth and the durability of Visa’s competitive position.

Visa’s latest results show the scale Pershing is buying

Visa’s fiscal third-quarter results, reported in late July, provide current operating context for the stake. Net revenue rose 14% from a year earlier to $11.6 billion, while GAAP net income increased 7% to $5.6 billion. Payments volume grew 10% on a constant-dollar basis in the three months ended June 30, total cross-border volume increased 13%, and Visa processed 71.7 billion transactions, up 10% from a year earlier.

Capital returns remained large during the quarter. Visa repurchased about 14.5 million Class A shares for $4.9 billion at an average cost of $330.71 per share and had $28.4 billion of remaining repurchase authorization at June 30. For Pershing, a shrinking share count can add to per-share earnings growth if the underlying business keeps expanding, although the benefit depends on the prices Visa pays for its own stock.

A key limit of the disclosure is that the $1.12 billion figure does not represent the amount Pershing necessarily spent to build the position. Form 13F reports the market value of covered holdings at quarter-end, not a manager’s precise cost basis or the dates of individual purchases. Pershing’s interim report said Visa had produced a 6% total return from its average cost through June 30, but it did not disclose an exact average purchase price in the filing.

Form 13F also provides only a quarterly snapshot of specified securities and does not by itself present every element of a manager’s economic exposure, cash position or hedging activity. Pershing notes in its materials that some hedges and other instruments are outside the portfolio-company table. The June 30 filing therefore establishes the size of the disclosed Visa holding at that date, not what Pershing owns today. The next concrete check will be Pershing’s third-quarter 13F, which will show whether the Visa position was maintained, increased or reduced as of September 30.