Investment firm DE Shaw increased its stake in Lucid Motors by over 60% during the first quarter of 2025, according to the firm’s latest quarterly portfolio update.
D.E. Shaw, which manages over $65 billion in assets, acquired 15,229,201 shares between January and March, bringing its total holdings to nearly 39.67 million — a record high.
As of March 31, the stake was valued at $96 million, with DE Shaw closing the quarter as Lucid’s fourth-largest institutional shareholder behind Vanguard, UBS and Blackrock.
The investment in the Newark-based company dates back to 2021, when it debuted in Nasdaq via its merger with the Churchill Capital Corp IV. However, it only showed a notable jump in the third quarter of 2024.
When D.E. Shaw reported its holdings by the end of September 2024, its Lucid position had increased nearly 18 times (1,771%) from just over 500,000 shares to more than 9 million.
In the last quarter of 2024, the hedge fund more than doubled its position in the automaker by 154%, from 9 million shares to more than 24 million.
Contrarily to the California EV maker, DE Shaw cut its position in Tesla by 42.8% between January and March. It held nearly 1.81 million shares, down from over 3 million.
After exiting its position in Rivian in the last quarter of 2024, the firm’s new filing showed that it acquired 68,246 shares in the company during the latest quarter.
Previously, its stake in the Irvine-based automaker had peaked at 16.84 million shares in late 2023, and declined sequentially until the most recent quarter.
Institutional Ownership
The asset manager ranked fourth among Lucid‘s biggest institutional shareholders, just after BlackRock, UBS and Vanguard, if excluding Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which owns 78% of the shares.
According to Nasdaq, the company has 544 institutional owners holding over 2 billion shares. The number of shares held by institutions jumped nearly 30% (from 1.7 billion) in the first three months of the year.
Vanguard added 615,108 shares in the first quarter, while UBS became Lucid‘s second largest institutional owner, with 57.12 million shares — up 33 million.
Charles Schwab narrowly increased its position in the automaker, holding 6.74 million shares by the end of March. Goldman Sachs nearly doubled its stake — adding 2.56 million shares, a new total of 5.44 million.
Nuveen, a 1.3 trillion asset manager, opened position in Lucid in the latest quarter, with nearly 3.4 million shares, ranking 19th among its institutional investors.
TechCrunch reported last week that the deliveries record in the first quarter was achieved in part through sales to rental fleets. In the recent regulatory report, the brand said that about 300 of the vehicles went to “rental companies.”
When approached by the media outlet, Lucid clarified that these were leasing companies and that the EVs were leased back to the company — in effect, the company sold and then rented them for its own use.
