Stanley Druckenmiller on Shareholder Orientation

DRUCKENMILLER: Well, first of all, I wasn't early with Nvidia. My young partner was early with Nvidia. He called me in the fall of '22 and said that he thought all this excitement about Blockchain was going to be far outweighed by AI. And I asked him how to play it and he told me I should buy this company Nvidia. I didn't even know how to spell it. I bought it. Then, a month later, ChatGPT happened. Even an old guy like me could figure out, okay, what that meant. So I increased the position substantially. I said in an interview in June of that year that I expected to own Nvidia for two or three years, that this was a mega trend like I'd never seen, potentially bigger than the Internet. But when the stock went from 150 to 900, I'm not Warren Buffett. I don't own things for 10 or 20 years. I wish I was Warren Buffett. And 150 to 900, yes, we did -- we did cut that position and lot of other positions in late March. I just need a break. We've had a -- we've had a hell of a run. A lot of what we recognized has become recognized by the marketplace now. Powell was -- we expected Powell to come back and re-pivot which he subsequently did. But no, long-term, we're as bullish on AI as we've ever been. And also, you just wonder, if we were all sitting here in 1999 talking about the Internet or anybody was talking about it, I don't think anybody would have estimated it would be as big as it got in 20 years. We didn't have the iPhone. We didn't have Uber.

We didn't have Facebook, yada, yada. And yet, if you bought the Nasdaq in '99, it went down 80 percent before that all came to fruition. That's not going to happen with AI. But it could rhyme – AI could rhyme with the Internet as we go through all this capital spending we need to do, the payoff while it's incrementally coming in by the day, the big payoff might be four to five years from now. So AI might be a little overhyped now but under-hyped long term.QUICK: You said you're not like Warren Buffett, but what you just did with Nvidia sounds an awful lot like what he did with Apple. He pared his position in Apple by 13 percent, and they went on to say it's a better company than Coca-Cola or American Express or any of the other companies that they have in their portfolio, and he thinks Tim Cook is great.DRUCKENMILLER: Yeah. Well, I will be very surprised if I don't own Nvidia on and off next 10 years.KERNEN: You're so bullish on AI. Andrew, you did a great interview with Perplexity and I think that -- that's where you decided might be a place that you want to be.ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Yeah.DRUCKENMILLER: I love perplexity. Again a funny story -- my young partner, the one who has basically been behind all our AI play with his -- with his staff. He told me, I don't know, in January, that all the kids on the West Coast weren't using ChatGPT or Google anymore. They were using this thing called Perplexity AI. So I, of course, tried it out and it was just unbelievable.

Let me just tell you a little bit about Sam. Most of you know both of them quite well. They're long-term members of our club, and they're really accomplished so much in their lifetime — lifetimes I should say. Sam, I sort of think of him as the king of cotton. Dunavant Enterprises, Inc., a cotton merchant, probably the largest in the world, Sam is a partner, president, co-chairman. He actually retired from that in 1995 and then he started Pinnacle Trading International of which he was president and CEO.

You have a very, very similar situation going on in Europe now. I know Mario Draghi and Angela Merkel don't like QE. They don’t like anything about it, but again, the chump - I have this partner. I don't know if he's in the room, Kevin Warsh who's on the Federal Reserve Board. He said Japan used to be the new chump because they had the overvalued currency. Now it's Europe. So, their currency went from 82 say back in 2000 all the way up to 160, and it was 140 last summer, and they're absolutely getting murdered. And now they're apparently caving in and they're going to print money.